Thailand’s Systematic Killing of Drug Addicts (2003)

Introduction

In 2003, the Prime Minister of Thailand announced a war on drugs, which led to the murder of thousands of drug addicts. The government put pressure on local police to reach a ‘quota’, where names on blacklists were targets. The government and police claimed that it was the drug dealers killing local addicts, but others were skeptical, believing that it was, in fact, the authorities conducted a massive sweep of a local drug called Yaba (a type of methamphetamine) by killing drug addicts.

See also:

• Grave Developments – Killings & Other Abuses [PDF]
• Not Enough Graves: The Way on Drugs, HIV/AIDS, and Violations of Human Rights [PDF]

Quotes

“Yaba is a stronger and more addictive variant of amphetamine or speed and it’s been flooding into Thailand at an alarming rate in recent years. There are now 3 million users – that means 5% of the total population.”

“In an effort to counter this national disaster, Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced an all-out war on drugs that began on the 1st of February. At the time, no one imagined he meant it literally – a war with plenty of body bags and even collateral damage.”

“Today when you’re out there, you must get the names of these drug addicts in the community. After you get those names, your people are to pressure them.”

“These women know very well that if they don’t take his advice and change their ways, they could well be the subject of tomorrow’s headline. The newspapers are full of stories about people just like them. Among the statistics, collateral damage so far includes a pregnant woman, a 75 year old woman and a one-year-old child. The Prime Minister admits there has been collateral damage but he’s always claimed that the majority of the murders are committed by drug dealers trying to silence potential informers.”

“It’s now openly suggested that government pressure on the police to make arrests and reach their blacklist targets is the reason that so many people are being killed.”

“The government wanted all the provinces in the country to meet certain criteria to show that they have been successful in combating drugs, so they’re measuring the failure or success of the campaign on statistics. The higher the numbers of people [that] get killed for being drug addicts … the better the rating you get. This means more killings, more drug arrests, and that means a lot of innocent people will be victims of the campaign.”

“What we are doing in Chiang Rai right now is the correct and most suitable way. If other provinces do better, we’ll adopt their methods. But if it is extrajudicial or pre-emptive killings, we’ll try to avoid that.”

“There have been about 500 people killed recently. But there are more than 60 million in Thailand. What if these baddies were alive to hurt the good people? They deserved to die. There should be more killed.”

“At the end of the first phase of the campaign, it’s impossible to tell where the demand has been reduced, although the 1,500 corpses have sent a chilling message to dealers and users alike. The second phase of the war is supposed to be about eliminating supply but that task was never going to be easy.”