Korea needs to create drug enforcement agency
Actor Lee Sun-kyun, who played a wealthy professional in the Oscar-winning movie “Parasite,” was booked Monday for an investigation into his alleged use of illegal drugs.
The indictment of Lee, who often appeared as a police officer or lawyer in films, was rather unexpected.
He is not alone, however.
In March, 21 people were caught doing drugs in a Seoul apartment. An off-duty police officer fell to his death there while on drugs. More recently, a mother in Busan reported her 15-year-old daughter to the police. The ninth-grader was found to have purchased 0.05 grams of methamphetamine for 400,000 won (US$300) via Telegram and injected it.
TV celebs and entertainers are not the nation’s only drug users. Public officials, students and physicians also use and circulate narcotics. “Many families will have a drug user in their midst,” said ex-Gyeonggi Province Governor Nam Kyung-pil, who reported his son for the same reason.
According to the prosecution, the number of drug offenders hit a record high of 18,395 last year, up nearly 50 percent from 2018. The number of offenders under age 30 jumped more than 100 percent to 10,988 during the period. And that of teens went up more than 200 percent to 481. The growth rate doubled as more young people began using drugs. Police reported that they had seized enough drugs for 12 million people to use at once. The amount of unseized drugs would be far larger.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Korea served as a base to make and supply meth to Japan. Busan, the nation’s largest port, was notorious as a “drug city.” Now, Korea imports drugs rather than making them, as Japan did decades ago. As people’s income levels rose, the nation became an emerging market for global drug traffickers. Korea is now seen as a country with ineffective drug control so traffickers use it as a transit point or even a hub.
Against this backdrop, President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a war on drugs in April. It was the right move, if not belated. However, the government will likely lose that battle as things stand now. The drug administration is dispersed among too many agencies, and their budgets aretoo tight.
In contrast, a more diverse and cheaper range of drugs are appearing. For instance, students can get a fentanyl patch for around 15,000 won ($11). One Seoul hospital prescribed thousands of such patches as painkillers. Reports show more than 1,000 new types of narcotics have landed in Korea.
Currently, the nation’s spy agency and customs service are attempting to block the inflow of drugs; the police and prosecution ferret out and punish offenders; the national tax office and financial regulators retrieve ill-gotten gains; and the health ministry “cures” and rehabilitates addicts. For more efficient handling of these jobs, the government should integrate as much work as possible into a single agency. The time has long passed for Korea to have an organization like the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The Ministry of Justice is pushing to establish a Korean DEA. The National Assembly should transcend partisan politics and approve it.
Examples from other countries show treatment and rehabilitation is a far better, and less costly, means of fighting drugs than cracking down on and punishing offenders. But that requires money and the finance ministry has slashed 85 percent of the budget requested by the health ministry.
The nation’s largest public hospital dealing exclusively with patients suffering from drug addiction said recently it would cease operations due to a lack of financial support. Even now, patients must wait months for vacancies at the hospital. Hundreds of patients have yet to be cured. Where should they go?
All this shows this government’s problem: it says one thing and does another. It’s like telling soldiers to fight while taking away their bullets.
The U.S. declared a war on drugs in the 1970s but has since wavered between rehabilitation and punishment. The government must match its words with actions.
Source: Yonhap News Agency