KUALA LUMPUR, June 5 — A national consensus is needed among all the relevant agencies in Malaysia on how to classify drug offenders to help move the country’s approach to drug problems to being more centred on harm reduction rather than punishment, an official from the National Anti-Drugs Agency (AADK) said today.

AADK Principal Assistant Director (Medical Treatment) Dr Ravi Ramadah said that all the relevant enforcement and health agencies, including the police and Health Ministry, should ideally have a common language in referring to drug addicts or drug dependent individuals to help with rehabilitation.

"We need to have this national consensus. We hope that we can achieve this in the next year or two,” Dr Ravi said during his presentation at a roundtable dialogue on health and criminal justice outcomes for the incarcerated at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia here.

He noted that the upcoming National drug Policy formulated by AADK will focus more on harm reduction for drug offenders.

He also stressed for the need to have stronger database in Malaysia in order to measure effectiveness of any policy change relating to drugs in the country.

"In many countries, they do population surveys. Over here, our data and statistics is based on enforcement agencies. So the more enforcement there is, the number will increase,” Dr Ravi said.

"When we have a strong set of information, we could see the difference with any, even minor, policy changes,” he added.

He said that one of the restraints in doing population surveys, apart from the cost factor, is the reticence of Malaysians who had taken drugs to admit doing so.

"How many people would come out and admit that they used drugs before?” he said.

Universiti Malaya’s Dean of Medicine Datuk Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman, who chaired today’s meeting, also said that there is need to "reconcile” the definitions of drug addictions among all government agencies.