Let’s get real.
Malaysia spent RM1.15 billion last year to keep people in prison for drug offences. If you add up enforcement, rehabilitation and administrative costs, you are looking at nearly RM2 billion a year.
That’s a system that’s bleeding money while pretending it’s fixing people.
And 85% of those arrested are not drug lords. They are small time users and for personal use.
Since 2019, police have recorded around 600,000 arrests, with 174,000 in 2024 alone. Yet only 15% were for trafficking or supply.
These were the figures recently reported by public health expert Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman at the first-ever Drug Policy Summit held earlier this month.
Prisons department director-general Nordin Muhamad in 2024 had cautioned that the nation’s prisons face overcrowding, with 75,000 inmates nationwide surpassing the capacity limit of 71,000 prisoners.
Four years ago, the government had said each inmate was costing Malaysian taxpayers around RM50 a day, That sum is likely to have gone up further by now.
Meanwhile, CodeBlue reported that individuals with opioid use disorder and placed in compulsory drug detention centres relapsed within an average of 31 days after release, whereas those who received methadone treatment in voluntary centres took much longer to relapse — about 352 days on average.
What does this mean?
All that money could be used to build secured community treatment centres, hire specialists, improve outreach programmes and provide proper mental health care.
You would ease overcrowding, lower relapse rates and actually get a return on investment in the form of rehabilitated and healthier individuals with fewer broken families.
Because the truth is, punishment does not fix addiction. Only treatment can.
Dr Adeeba is right when she says Malaysia’s own harm reduction programmes already work, as the country’s Needle and Syringe Exchange Programme, launched in 2006, has drastically slashed HIV transmission linked to needle-sharing.
Those efforts have saved hundreds of millions of ringgit that would otherwise have gone to lifelong HIV treatment.
They have also proven that compassion backed by evidence costs less and works better.
If your business was losing billions on a failing plan, you would change your business model. Fast. You would cut losses and reinvest in what works to stop draining another RM2 billion next year.
To persist with the same business model, despite evidence of its failure, would be insanity.
But yet we will see another 170,000 arrests — another generation of young Malaysians trapped in the cycle of addiction and prison, and the attendant stigma.
Dr Adeeba is not asking for sympathy. She’s asking for strategy. A strategy that treats people, not numbers. A plan that saves lives, saves money, and restores hope for families.
Because the smartest deal this country can make does not involve locking people up — it is about unlocking their potential.
Minderjeet Kaur is a senior journalist in FMT.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.
