News & Comment
Capitalism and the Endless Drugs Crisis

News:

Total war on drugs waged by the Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte gained international attention and critics. As reported by Asian Correspondent, Philippine National Police reported that 1,466 people were killed in police operations. Meanwhile, another 1,490 were killed by a group that was legally allowed to act as a vigilante. They all died within the past two months, after the total war on drugs was declared.

This war raging in Philippines is not really new thing in ASEAN. Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam have been recorded to routinely execute the drug-related perpetrators with death penalty since last five years. Southeast Asia does have a relatively high rate drug trafficking problem. The region Myanmar-Thailand-Laos is known as the 'Golden Triangle' which supplies 30 percent of the raw material of opium to worldwide.

In 1998, all ASEAN countries agreed to declare the region to be free from drug crimes in 2015. However, the data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) showed the opposite trend: drug trafficking has increased many-fold. Production of opium and heroin from the Golden Triangle actually increased three-fold last year compared to 2008. For Indonesia, the data from Indonesian National Police showed that drug crime cases increased by 13.6 percent every year.

Comment:

In this modern era, drugs become an everlasting crisis, because there is an everlasting demand chain, i.e. the desperate hedonic people in today's secular civilization. Drugs, beside get its ‘oxygen’ from capitalistic economy system, this millions of dollars businesses also growing exist because of secular values contribution, which always promotes absolute freedom within the societies and at the same time spreads despair and misery as dehumanization occurs everywhere. Yes, the permissive, hedonist, and depressed society combined with perpetrators of crime and corrupt bureaucrats have been maintaining the demand chain of drugs.

So that’s why Duterte take extreme step and blindly fight against drugs in his country as his despair with problem magnitude and its impact on his society. However, Duterte, Jokowi, and other Southeast Asian leaders are actually dealing with a vicious circle that is difficult to cut, if not from the basic values ​​and the system of civilization. All rooted from the birth defects radical capitalism ideology. The Western civilization that characterized by three things: secular, pragmatic, and hedonic –as proposed by Taqiuddin an-Nabahani— has transmitted the same characteristics to the life of society in Southeast Asia, along with the immediate damage consequences spreading to the societies.

Radical individualism which is fruit of acute secularism has produced a generation that is mentally broken, spiritually empty, and fails to define the reality of life, as well as doesn’t have real purpose in life. Such generation is vulnerable to be enamored with hedonistic and pragmatic lifestyle, also easy to be trapped in the puddles of criminality. This named as a “Chicago Syndrome” by a Malaysian professor, Prof. Dr. Moh’d Kamal Hassan, a syndrome of Western civilization whose symptoms are “having economic progress but suffering detrimental civilization“.

Therefore, the people in Southeast Asia need to be de-radicalized from liberal values, secular bigotry, and capitalist terrorist. Capitalism ideology has become a "conveyor belt" of rampant business kingpins and drug dealers. The victims number NOT only hundreds or thousands, BUT millions – and this is precisely the real threat to our society and our young future generations.

Muslim leaders in Southeast Asia should not panic and take extreme step as done by Duterte, nor being nervous producing a misdirected “de-radicalization policy” against Islam, but in contrary they need to seriously de-radicalize their society from the dangerous secular Capitalism values. This effort can only be done by returning to Islam, then no need to spend millions dollars for scientific research of how to eradicate drugs, Islam is more than enough. As the words of Sayyid Qutb, "Islam eliminates ingrained habits in jahiliyah societies only by a few sheets of the Quran." Subhanallah.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by

Fika Komara