KUALA LUMPUR: Drug pushers are using a new tactic to expand their client base by offering "incentives" to addicts who can bring in more customers.
Describing it as akin to a multi-level marketing (MLM) strategy, National Anti-Drugs Agency (Nada) director-general Sutekno Ahmad Belon said the main targets of these pushers and addicts were school-going teenagers.
He said based on their checks, the pushers would prey on the addicts' poor financial situation.
"They are now employing an MLM-style concept. For example, a pusher would give an addict five tubes of drugs.
"Two would be for the addict's consumption, provided the addict manages to sell the other three tubes.
"In order to sell the remaining drugs, the addict would have to find other addicts, thus creating a new market. The easiest target for these addicts are secondary school students," he said.
Sutekno said this strategy placed the burden of selling drugs on the addicts instead of the dealer.
Targeting schoolchildren, he added, made sense to the addicts as students had pocket money and were naturally curious to try new things.
"As such, when one market (school) gets saturated, the addicts will move on to a different school, thus widening the pool of potential drug addicts."
Sutekno said parents often found it difficult to believe that their children were using drugs.
This, he said, was because the physical effects of using synthetic drugs, which are popular among youngsters, were sometimes hard to detect.
"Parents would say their children look fine, that they don't look like addicts.
"But when we bring them in for a check-up and a session with a psychiatrist, we would find that some have developed psychological issues due to drug use.
"Some of these kids even have syphilis (as they would use drugs to trade for sex)," he said.
Sutekno said some parents would rather believe that their children had become victims of black magic.
He cited a case encountered by one of his officers that involved a female student, who was a likeable and pretty girl.
"However, she suddenly became uncontrollable. Her parents immediately thought that she had fallen victim to some sort of black magic due to her popularity.
"They didn't even consider that she could have been hooked on drugs. Our officer urged the parents to bring her to the hospital for a check-up instead.
"That was when they found out that she was addicted to methamphetamine.
"These are among the challenges we face when it comes to synthetic drug use (because it has almost unnoticeable physical effects)," he said.
Many of the synthetic drugs, he said, were locally produced.
"The labs are simple. The manufacturers use high-rise condominiums to avoid detection by the authorities. They would pay two years' rent up-front.
"The houseowner would also leave them alone since they have already paid the rent well in advance," he said.
"With all this time and freedom, they can even learn how to produce different synthetic drugs. It is also easy to find the precursors (ingredients)," he added.
Additional reporting by Fuad Nizam