Najib Says Number Of Addicts Far Below One Million

KUALA LUMPUR, March 20 (Bernama) -- Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, Monday rejected a report that there are one million drug addicts in the country, saying the actual figure is much lower even after counting those yet to be detected.
He reminded people who wished to issue statements based on assumptions to be more careful.
Najib, who is the chairman of the Cabinet committee to combat drug addiction, said the authorities knew the number of confirmed drug addicts.
"Maybe there are some who have not been detected but I don't believe the total can reach one million," he said at a news conference in Parliament House, Monday.
The Director-General of Youth and Sports, Datuk Soraya Selamat, was quoted in the press today as saying the number of addicts exceeded one million or 10 per cent of the 11 million people categorised as youth in the country.
The report said Soraya based the estimate on the 270,000 addicts confirmed by the National Anti-Drug Agency and the assumption that each addict detected had five or six undetected friends who were also drug abusers.
Najib said the agency's statistics showed the addicts detected since 1988 until 2005 totalled 289,763 with 32,000 detected last year out of whom 15,389 were new addicts.
Asked about government measures to overcome the scourge, he said a new method of treating addicts by using methadone had been introduced and also adopted by private clinics offering treatment to addicts.
The use of methadone, a drug which treats addiction by suppressing narcotic withdrawal symptoms and dependence, had shown encouraging result and would be expanded if the pilot project succeeded, he said.
He said the opening of more drug rehabilitation centres would not solve or reduce the problem since many addicts released by the centres after treatment went back to their old habit.
The relapse happened because most of the addicts were spurned by their families, he said.
Najib said the rehabilitation centres had not failed totally but the government needed to look for more effective methods to rehabilitate addicts and solve the drug addiction problem.
On the programme to reduce the spread of HIV by distributing free syringes and condoms to drug addicts, he said it was at the trial stage.
"We are doing it quietly. We do not want the programme to be misinterpreted as encouraging drug addiction. It is in fact related to the methadone programme," he said.
He said many HIV cases resulted from drug addicts sharing needles and this caused the spread of HIV to the wives or husbands of the addicts who became infected.