Drugs and drug wars as populist tropes in Asia: Illustrative examples and implications for drug policy

The Philippines may be the face of today's ‘drug wars’, but its experience is by no means exceptional - as the contemporary examples of Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka show. In the early 2000s Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra also embarked on a ‘drug war’ with striking parallels to the Philippines in terms of its human toll and failed outcomes. This paper uses the framework of populism - defined as a political style - to survey punitive drug...