State Minister of Foreign Affairs Vasantha Senanayake asserted that stricter laws and penalties must be introduced to have better success with tackling the drug menace. Below are excerpts of his interview with The Sunday Morning: What do you see as the main factor for successive governments' failure in tackling the drug menace? There are various reasons for this. One such reason is that we don’t yet have adequate systems for monitoring our shores. Our borders must be secured better. The other problem is that lots of these people who are involved in these illicit trades have lots of connections to politicians. They fund a lot of political campaigns and enjoy patronage from very high levels. Of course, our laws are inadequate as well. Another issue is we find that confiscated drugs have a peculiar way of turning out to be some other harmless substance when produced before courts. There have been instances where white substances have turned out to be flour or some other harmless substance when it is produced in courts. How this happens is quite strange because the arresting authority knows what they are confiscating. They know better than to take flour into custody. So there are many areas where there are slip ups in the system. There have been recent reports of confiscated drugs finding its way back into the black market. How do you see this? Yes, that may have something to do with the fact that when drugs are apprehended, like I said before, it turns out to be some harmless substance when produced before courts. So where did the initially confiscated drugs go? It is clear that somewhere down the line, after the drugs are confiscated, it goes missing instead of going to the analysts. So this shows that there are lots of places where this drug money can buy various people of authority. When looking at tackling the drug menace, would it be best to address the issue of demand for drugs or the supply of drugs? It is not the addicts that we need to punish. We need to punish the people who have been part of this trade and who have benefitted and have amassed a lot of assets by selling these illegal substances. They are destroying a generation in this country. It is the distributors and the kingpins who are making money that should be dealt with severely with their assets being confiscated and severe penalties. The fines involving narcotics are completely inadequate. Fines should be made substantial. The law must be severe against such culprits. Do you believe there are parliamentarians involved in drug racketeering? If so, why do political parties continue to nominate such corrupt individuals? I don’t know for sure if there are parliamentarians linked with the drug trade. If that is so, it is very unfortunate. But to answer the other part of the question, drugs bring in a lot of money and they can fund campaigns and they can fund political parties. Sometimes, parties might take money from people that they don’t really know are involved in the drug trade because parties need money during election time. That is why politicians should really exercise a lot of discretion about whom they take money from. What best practices from developed nations can we emulate in tackling our narcotics problem? Well, it depends on what side of the coin you want to look at it from. A country like Singapore has addressed the issue by implementing the death penalty. I’m not saying that we should do that. There are other countries that have opted to take less draconian measures like confiscating assets. I think confiscating all assets of drug dealers would be appropriate, also to curb the practice of the drug trade which is happening from within prisons. Prisons are where most of the drug deals are made according to reliable information. So we should have a look at all these things and we should bring tougher legislation, fines should be made much greater, confiscation of assets should be looked at as a measure of containing the problem, and of course, monitor our shores better.