Understanding the History and Geopolitics of the United States in the Thailand's Golden Triangle: Relations Between Drug Addiction and Trafficking on Malaysian Security

Abstract

We examine the latest proposals of new Malaysia's government to decriminalise drug addiction issues. From defence and security perspective, the authors cautioned Malaysia's hasty decision to decriminalise drug addicts when existing security measures to combat drug smuggling at the cross-border remained unresolved. In demonstrating the relations between illegal drug supplies in the Malaysian black market with the transnational drug syndicate, the authors focus historical existence of the Golden Triangle and the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) presence in the area during the Cold War. The CIA’s involvement in the drug triangle within complex nested security threats. It brought the Malaysian history of drugs and the introduction of capital punishment with the past relations of Malaya's communist insurgency with the northern Vietnam government and the Vietnam War. Given the current shift of the Southeast Asian tension involving the US-China power rivalry in the South China Sea, any current attempt to decriminalise dangerous addicted substances must take into past the historical geopolitical complexity of transnational and traditional security threats. Currently, the conceptualisation of drug addictions as national security threats relies upon existing capital punishment for drug abuse as a criminal offence. These offences relied heavily upon jurisprudence conceptualisation of addiction with possession of the abused substance. A proposal to decriminalise Malaysian addicts needs to understand the reliance of threats upon criminal offence concepts of the addictive substance. Thus, without criminological concepts of unlawful possession, legal loopholes cannot deter transnational security problems caused by drug traffickers and smugglers.