Drug-free nation: Reconstructing the ‘official drug narratives’ in Singapore and the Philippines

Abstract

Background

This paper reconstructs and analyses the “official drug narratives” in Singapore and the Philippines as recounted by its drug enforcement agencies and government officials. Drawing inspiration from narrative analyses and works that have explored official and institutional narratives, it defines such narratives as government accounts of how drugs figured in its country’s history and how it responded to the challenges posed by drugs to society. It then identifies common elements in these narratives, namely plot, settings, characters, and moral of the story.

Methods

Documents and other material from drug-policy and-enforcement related institutions, primarily the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) for Singapore, and the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) and Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) for the Philippines, from 2015 to 2024, with particularly attention to drug policy-related anniversaries and official commemorations.

Findings

In both countries, official drug narratives highlight the national(list) character of their drug policies and cast their longstanding campaigns in existential terms, relying on the language of statistics and expertise, as well as a curation of the past, to legitimise the righteousness of their initiatives. While people involved with drugs were the expected ‘villains’ and the citizenry, especially the youth, the expected victims, notable was the characterisation of drug enforcers as underdogs pit against powerful enemies.

Conclusion

Analysing official drug narratives offers a way to examine a country’s policy trajectories and overall paradigms and call attention to aspects that may be overlooked because they are not directly related to policy. By reconstructing the narrative content and structure of governments’ discourses on drugs, official drug narratives can contribute towards a better understanding not just of the making of national drug policies, but on the stories on which they stand.