By Nina Muslim
This article is in conjunction with International Women’s Day on March 8.
KUALA LUMPUR, March 7 (Bernama) – One afternoon in August 2024, Alice (not her real name) opened her bedroom door to a man and a woman asking her to follow them to a place almost 300 kilometres away, which was anything but a wonderland.
Blood-shot eyes hidden behind sunglasses and her ears obscured by headphones, Alice at first tried to ignore the strangers.
However, they were insistent. They were there at her parents’ behest, they said. Her parents were worried about her cycle of using Ecstasy, known as X, to destress, and crystal methamphetamine, or Ice, to stay awake. So her parents called a non-governmental organisation (NGO) Komited Malaysia to help her.
Alice was resistant. But after much coaxing, she relented, saying she was “high enough to agree to anything”.
Now, at Komited Malaysia’s female rehabilitation centre and halfway house Casa Femina in Kuantan, Pahang, the 39-year-old former criminal defence attorney admits she had an unhealthy relationship with drugs. Although she was not addicted to them, she was mentally dependent on them, using drugs as a crutch when she was overwhelmed with work.
“Yeah, the mistake I’ve done is (using drugs) to get away for a bit but in the end, I don’t solve anything,” she told Bernama.
She said that as one of the few women practicing criminal law in Malaysia, she felt she had no one to talk to who would understand her struggles at work while dealing with sexism.
Unfortunately, sexism does not end there. No matter where she and others go, sexism colours their life at every turn, even during rehab and after.
Decriminalising drugs, experts say, would help all, especially women, who are among the worst impacted despite being less likely to use drugs.
In Malaysia’s case, although the Dewan Rakyat passed the Drug Dependants (Treatment and Rehabilitation) (Amendment) Bill 2024 on July 18, 2024, to decriminalise drug use and treat addiction as a health issue, provisions in the amendments require involuntary commitment for drug users, including recreational users and non-addicts, and mandatory reporting of any drug user by doctors, which experts are against.
REASONS
Rather than lowering the number of drug users in the country, experts say current policies, which are punitive in nature, have failed. Measures such as involuntary commitment for substance abuse for up to two years for drug users and incarceration should they test positive within a year after release do not help users and addicts stop using drugs.
Although Malaysia’s 2024 statistics on drug users only covered data up to September, the numbers showed a huge increase in the first nine months of last year compared to the whole of 2023. By September 2024, a total of 169,691 drug users, including 7,331 women, were detected by the National Anti-Drugs Agency (NADA, an agency under the Ministry of Home Affairs), the police and the Ministry of Health. In 2023, the number of drug users detected was 145,526, including 6,318 women. Amphetamine-like stimulants such as X, ice and syabu are reportedly the most popular drugs among users.
The problem with the country’s drug policies, which have been called outdated and a remnant of British colonialism, is that they seldom look into the reasons why people use drugs, according to Dr Nur Afiqah Mohd Salleh, an advisor to the National Drug Policy Programme (NDPP) under the Malaysian AIDS Foundation.
She added that women’s reasons for using drugs can differ from men’s.
For one thing, gender-based violence can push women into drugs as a means of escape.
Samantha Chong, another NDPP advisor and a former officer to the Law Minister, agreed. Chong would often tell participants at drug decriminalisation workshops and events about a case that left a mark on her.
“I was defending a woman who was facing drug charges. She had been raped by her father and brother. She told me if she couldn’t take drugs, she would kill herself,” she said.
Yasmin Khan, 26, founder of Sage Centre – a private centre for rehabilitation and counselling – could empathise with that feeling of desperation, as she felt the same when she was a 20-year-old student in the United Kingdom
Her first boyfriend had started abusing her a year into their relationship. He would beg for her forgiveness, shower her with affection and promise he would change, and she would forgive him. Things would be better for a bit, then he would hit her again for some reason or other. She was soon trapped in a vicious cycle of intense love, forgiveness and violence.
Alone in a foreign country with no support system outside her circle of friends that included her boyfriend, she tried drugs with her friends one day. Yasmin told Bernama it was a revelation.
“I could feel that I was not within myself (when doing drugs) because all I wanted to do was escape from my own head. Because being in my own head was scary. Being alone was scary,” she said at her office.
While there are gender-based reasons for women to start using drugs and become dependent, more women are now using drugs for general reasons oft-cited by men, such as family and work pressures.
Alice used X and ice to deal with the work stress and pressures of being a woman in a male-dominated field. She relapsed several times, including after her stint at the rehab centre and prison.
For Rosnani Awang, 51, her reasons were more mundane. She tried drugs as a bored 19-year-old in Terengganu with her friends. The drug of choice then was heroin, which she quickly became addicted to. She also used and trafficked crystal methamphetamines, or syabu, saying she was once wanted by police in several states.
LONG SHADOWS
The effects of a history of drug use are numerous. In Malaysia, getting and holding a job with a history of drug use or drug conviction can be difficult for both men and women.
But there are other effects that are unique for women. The stigma is higher for women, for one thing. In Rosnani’s case, the hits just kept on coming.
A mother of two daughters, she lost custody of them in 2011. It gave her the final push to stop using drugs for good. She went to Komited Malaysia voluntarily.
But it did not stop there. Although she has not been using drugs since 2011, society judged her as if she never stopped. She can attest to six broken engagements, one broken two weeks before the actual nuptials due to her fiance’s family discovering her past use of drugs. Even if her fiance initially withstood the onslaught, he ultimately caved in, leaving her with a broken heart.
“I want someone normal so I won’t be tempted (to use drugs) but their family won’t accept me,” she told Bernama.
She added that she has observed this phenomenon among former female drug users but not male users.
Sazura Sarif, Komited Malaysia’s programme manager at Casa Femina, agreed, saying women have no freedom to make mistakes. Sazura herself is married to a former addict, who is working in harm reduction programmes.
“People will look down on you forever” if a former drug user is a woman, she said. But men who no longer use drugs are admired for reforming or repenting.
Yasmin, who luckily never had to go through the criminal justice system in Malaysia, does not carry as much obvious baggage as the other women because she ended her dependence on drugs in the UK. However, she decided to take her experience and channel it into opening an outpatient counselling and rehab centre.
”It ties with my personal (beliefs) because I want to make sure people know they’re not alone. Because I’ve had a history where I did feel alone and I did feel like I didn’t know who to talk to or who to trust and I wanted to be that person for people,” she said.
METHODS
Under this country’s decriminalisation of drug use, drugs would still be illegal and drug traffickers who have an exorbitant amount of drugs in their possession will still face stiff penalties. However, those who use drugs or are caught with small amounts of drugs will no longer go through the criminal justice system.
Experts have said sending first offenders or casual users to prison just makes things worse as that is where they “graduate” into becoming hard-core users.
Alice, who went through a strict anti-drug rehab programme run by NADA as well as served three months in prison before, can attest to this fact. She never had trouble getting drugs when she was a lawyer, and once she went through the rehab system, it got even easier.
“The inmates would share their drug contacts outside,” she told Bernama. And once she was out of rehab, she contacted them.
“I wanted revenge for the jail time, so once I was out, I got drugs,” she confessed, grimacing. She was angry about going to prison, which did not teach her how to cope with life’s problems without drugs, either.
She prefers Komited Malaysia despite their abstinence-only programme. For one thing, there was more personal counselling from former addicts who understood her journey. There was also more freedom – she was allowed a mobile phone during office hours and to help out at the NGO’s office.
Involuntary rehab is one thing that needs to go away, under the NDPP plan. Outpatient rehab and counselling are usually better.
Yasmin and Sage Centre’s head clinical psychologist Nabila Burhanuddin, 30, said having an outpatient programme would allow users to “test” themselves and learn to cope with triggers in real time.
“It’s easy to get clean at an involuntary rehab centre because it’s a controlled environment. Once out, they relapse,” said Nabila.
Sage Centre’s programme requires clients to come in for counselling every day for a few hours for three months before tapering off. Although they ensure complete privacy and confidentiality, the cost of their service may be prohibitive.
The outpatient concept is an example of low-threshold rehab services but Dr Nur Afiqah wants the threshold for treatment to be even lower, with fewer barriers to seeking counselling and treatment.
The NDPP is advocating for the establishment of one-stop centres for addiction, staffed by addiction experts, out in the community instead of in a healthcare facility. Mobile units can provide outreach and safety monitoring in places with plenty of drug use, including universities, concerts and nightclubs.
”In Canada, they have low threshold services … (that are) more community-friendly and people find it easier to navigate through the services rather than making it compulsory for them to go through the regular registration, pre-assessment and eligibility criteria screening,” said Dr Nur Afiqah.
Deputy Health Minister Datuk Lukanisman Awang Sauni, who heads the NDPP advisory panel, has vowed to make actual drug decriminalisation a reality.
— BERNAMA