KUALA LUMPUR: Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi wants a more qualitative measure taken to combat drug use among secondary school students including confiscating assets belonging to drug dealers.
“We will ask the court to liquidate these assets and the money will be used for drug prevention, treatment and enforcement,” he said.
Zahid, who is also the Deputy Prime Minister, said the government is very concerned about the alarming number of students tested positive for drugs based on a study done by the Education Ministry this year.
“The study shows out of more than 36,000 students tested, four percent or 1,457 students tested positive for drugs,” he said adding the highest number of students were from Kedah with 274 students.
Kelantan had the second highest number of students with 197 followed by Perak with 180 students tested positive for drugs.
“The community and parents must not just depend on government agencies and enforcement to prevent drug abuse among students, they too must be proactive in avoiding drug use in students,” he said at a press conference after chairing a cabinet committee meeting at the Parliament building here, yesterday.
Zahid said 0.08 per cent of students tested positive for drugs are in Form One, 5.4 per cent are Form Two, another 19.8 percent are Form Three students.
“As many as 32.5 percent of the students are in Form Four while 40.6 per cent of them are in Form Five and the remaining 1.62 percent are Form Six students,” he said.
Zahid said most students, as many as 74 per cent of them were tested positive for synthetic drugs while 20 per cent were tested positive for cannabis and the other drugs included Ketamine and Amphetamine.
“We will continue to empower the National Anti Drugs Agency (AADK), our police Narcotics team, Health ministry, Customs department and Anti-Drug association Malaysia (PEMADAM) and the conventional ways of combating drug abuse will be changed to a new form,” he said, adding the strength of the enforcement team should not be measured by the number of officers but by the networking or multiplying effects and how effective is the measures taken.
Zahid said 20 agencies are focused on drug prevention, drug abuse treatment and enforcement.