Comparative Drug Policy — Revisited 2026
The human war on drugs — especially opioid drugs — never stops. Most countries face an overt or covert war on drugs, and many announce that obtaining excess opioid drugs (or, a step further, heroin) is illegal.
In China, only a few patients are prescribed opioid drugs even when they face extreme pain. Because of strict regulations, ordinary people have no access; though there are reports that some movie stars or sports stars use drugs to get high. When people are caught using, holding, or selling drugs, they face a long time in jail, huge fines, or even capital punishment. This is why criminal gangs of drugs are not a severe problem in China. Most people involved with drugs come from the dark side of society (gang members) or from the upper level (celebrities).
In the United States, the circumstance is well described by the phrase “the opioid epidemic.” Due to excess prescriptions, people gradually became addicted to opioids, some even seeking heroin because it’s cheaper and more powerful. People charged with using or holding a small amount of heroin face tens of months in jail — a comparatively short time compared to China. It is very hard to keep clean for long; most heroin addicts collapse after several months and are then put back into jail. This loop never ends. Now different states have devised different ways to handle the problem — to find a balance between putting addicts into jail and educating them to keep clean. Statistically, most addicts are white people and middle-class people. They have money to buy drugs. This is quite different from China and the Philippines mentioned below.
In my opinion, we should on one hand popularize education on drugs — especially the outcomes of using drugs, like ruining a whole family — and on the other hand keep strict rules and strong punishments for those who frequently use drugs. People who use drugs many times are nearly impossible to bring back, and they may influence younger generations when they deal with others on the street. Teenagers may imitate their behavior; these addicts may even try to sell drugs to teenagers, and schools will be contaminated. Keeping tight on those people is significant for making a good social environment for younger generations — this is the basis of our hope that drug problems will be solved in the next few generations. Yet we also don’t want to abandon those addicts. Some special clinics provide less powerful and less harmful drugs to addicts to help them live a near-normal life.
The last country I want to refer to is the Philippines. The president announced a whole-country war on drugs in 2016, urging members of the public to kill criminals and drug addicts. Most addicts there come from poor communities; because of the great power of criminal gangs, drugs cycle in these poor communities. In the president’s own words, the war was toward criminal groups and the poor. However, when police power is extensively used, there are situations in which police don’t respect suspects’ human rights. Sometimes, police might kill suspects who would never have been sentenced to die by a court. The war is still on. I need to admit that it is really hard to balance punishing and educating drug users.
Finally, I think the United Nations should be empowered to handle transnational criminal markets more effectively. This is the greatest source of drugs — demand and supply influence each other. At the same time, more efforts on education and proportionate punishment to lower demand will help significantly.
Revisited 2026 — what I’d add now.
Five years on, fentanyl has replaced heroin as the key word of “the opioid epidemic.” Fentanyl is roughly 100× more potent per gram than heroin, which means the “small amount held” framing of my 2021 self is now more dangerous in 2026 — the unit of judgement itself needs recalibration.
On the policy side, four things 2021-me hadn’t yet seen clearly:
(1) Harm reduction moved from the margin to the mainstream. Supervised consumption, sterile-supply programs, fentanyl test strips, naloxone (Narcan) distribution — tools that were “fringe” in 2021 are now standard in many jurisdictions. This doesn’t mean the deterrence model has been replaced; it means a combined form of proportionate punishment + harm reduction + treatment is more often adopted at the policy level.
(2) From 2023 onward, US-China cooperation on precursor-chemical regulation became substantive — directionally aligned with the “UN power” I gestured at in 2021, but the actual route is bilateral rather than multilateral. What the next U.S. administration does remains a variable.
(3) The demographic profile of opioid use is changing. I said in 2021 that “most U.S. addicts are white, middle-class.” 2026 statistics show racial and class lines are blurring; the type of drug and the type of person who uses it no longer correlate as strongly.
(4) The Philippines war on drugs has come under ICC scrutiny. In 2021 this was a “moral-level concern”; now it has entered a legal-accountability track.
None of this was visible from January 2021. What survives is the headline: deterrence alone isn’t enough, treatment alone isn’t enough — what’s needed is a combination of proportionate punishment, education, and harm reduction; and transnational cooperation cannot remain only at the level of “vision.” That is the judgement from this old post I am most willing to preserve.