As Vietnam launches its toughest anti-drug campaign yet, it is choosing its model. And it isn’t the one its neighbour just abandoned.
Through June, Vietnam ran its 2026 Anti-Drug Action Month under a blunt national theme: a shared determination to build a drug-free commune. Provincial police forces launched simultaneous high-intensity operations to suppress drug crime and screen users. Hanoi also convened China, Laos and Myanmar to agree a three-month joint crackdown along their shared borders, running through to mid-September.
What is striking is how far the campaign reaches beyond policing. This is not a crackdown the public is asked merely to tolerate; it is one they are mobilised to join. The month built in public rallies, community running events, artistic programmes, exhibitions and digital campaigns, alongside anti-drug education in schools and the active involvement of community leaders, religious figures and local residents. Communes across the country have staged their own launch ceremonies, declaring local determination to become drug-free. Running underneath the enforcement is a recovery arm too, with state-backed credit programmes to help former drug users access vocational training, employment and reintegration. The framing throughout is that drug prevention is a task for the whole of society, not just the police, and on the ground the campaign appears to enjoy genuinely broad support. Hard outcome data is another matter, and Vietnam’s own figures are not independently audited, but the popular backing for the approach is not in doubt.
This is a country leaning further into prohibition, not away from it. And it is doing so at the precise moment much of the world is supposedly moving the other way. To understand the bet Vietnam is making, it helps to look at the two models now on offer in its own neighbourhood, and at what happened to the country that tried the other one.
A Region at a Fork in the Road
Vietnamese officials have been explicit. They do not accept the global trend toward legalising drug use, and they remain committed to a long-term vision of a drug-free region. Vietnam is one of the toughest jurisdictions in the world on the supply side, retaining capital punishment for serious trafficking offences. That is a dimension of its approach which draws sustained international criticism, and one worth naming honestly rather than glossing over.
Where does that leave Vietnam in the regional picture? Firmly in the same camp as Singapore and Japan, and well away from the road Thailand has just retraced.
Singapore draws a deliberate line between two ideas. One is “harm reduction”, which manages the damage once drugs are already embedded in a society. The other is what it calls “harm prevention”: keeping that damage from taking root in the first place. As one senior Singaporean minister put it, some countries reach a point where drugs are so pervasive that they have little choice but to let them circulate. Singapore’s stated aim is to never arrive there at all. Japan sits in much the same camp. It has some of the lowest drug-use rates in the developed world, underpinned by strict laws and a strong cultural disapproval that does work no statute can.
The Thai Cautionary Tale
The alternative model is not hypothetical. Thailand tried it, and then reversed it.
When Thailand removed cannabis from its narcotics list in 2022, becoming the first country in the region to do so, the industry exploded rapidly. By the time the brakes went on, the country had registered well over 18,000 cannabis shops, with the market valued at more than a billion US dollars. The problem, by near-universal agreement, was that decriminalisation arrived without a regulatory framework to govern it. The result was not a tidy, medicalised market but a fast, largely unregulated free-for-all.
Thai authorities and local reporting increasingly pointed to the downstream costs. They flagged rising cannabis-related poisonings, and growing concern about dependence among young people. In June 2025, the government reversed course. Cannabis flower was reclassified as a controlled herb, recreational use was recriminalised, and sales were restricted to patients holding a valid medical prescription. Thousands of the shops that opened during the boom soon had to close.
For prevention advocates, the lesson was not really about cannabis itself. It was about commercialisation. Once an industry is built on normalising a substance, the incentives all run one way, and the public-health bill arrives later, payable by the young.
Why the Stakes Are Not Abstract
(Source: Vietnamese state media)
Vietnam’s hard line can read as severe from a distance. Up close, the trade it is fighting is anything but abstract, as a recent killing on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City made clear.
In May, a senior figure in the so-called Coconut Cartel, a western Sydney syndicate, was shot dead outside a restaurant in a busy HCMC dining precinct. The dead man, 24-year-old Lorenzo Lemalu Tovia, was an Australian; a second Sydney man was wounded in the same attack. Street-level footage of the killing, captured on the cheap phones some locals wryly call “rice-powered cameras”, spread quickly across the internet. Two Samoan men, Joseph Vaa, 27, and Steve Tofa, 23, later confessed to the shooting on Vietnamese television and now face a potential death penalty.
The cartel itself had just been all but dismantled in Australia, where NSW Police blamed it for a long run of shootings, kidnappings and attempted murders driven by a turf feud with a rival network. The violence, in other words, did not stop at a border. It followed the trade all the way to Vietnam’s doorstep. This is the reality a drug-free-region policy is built to keep out, and the reason Vietnam is unmoved by arguments that the war on drugs is simply unwinnable.
The Enforcement Reflex, in Sydney and Hanoi
Australia’s response shows how alike the instincts are at both ends of this trade. Days after the cartel arrests, the NSW Parliament passed the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Organised and Gang-related Crime Reforms) Bill 2026. It is a serious piece of law. A new aggravated offence now covers the “kill cars” that organised crime uses and then torches to destroy evidence. The window for authorities to seize assets of people subject to Drug Trafficker Declarations has been extended from one year to five. Bail conditions change so that courts can weigh an accused person’s organised crime links, with specific measures targeting the recruitment of children to do the dangerous work.
These are sensible reforms, and they deserve support. So does much of Vietnam’s enforcement effort. But every one of these tools, in Hanoi as in Sydney, responds to harm that has already happened.
By the time a cartel is dismantled, the damage is done. The young person recruited into a kill car has already been recruited. The community that lived under the shootings has already lived under them. Vietnam can run the toughest supply-side regime in the region. New South Wales can pass the firmest laws in a decade. Both will still be arriving after the fall.
The NSW reforms name the recruitment of children as a specific target, and that is the detail that should focus everyone’s attention. Networks like this do not run on hardened veterans alone. They run on a steady supply of young people with little to lose. Money, status and a sense of belonging they could not find anywhere else draw them in. The two young Samoan men who confessed to the Ho Chi Minh City killing fit the pattern exactly: reportedly ordinary workers caught up in something far larger than themselves. The flashy side of this world is now lived out in public, on social media, for an audience of teenagers who are watching closely. There are good reasons not to reproduce or glamourise any of it. But it would be naive to pretend it is not a recruitment tool. It is.
Prevention Is the Half That Lasts
This is where Singapore’s distinction earns its keep, and where drug prevention proves its worth. There is a real difference between a society that prevents harm and one that has resigned itself to reducing it. That difference takes shape upstream, long before a court or a customs scanner ever gets involved.
Across decades of this field, the evidence keeps pointing to the same protective factors. A young person who has belonging, identity, meaning and a trusted adult in their corner is far harder to recruit than one who has none of those things. The cartel understands this better than most prevention campaigns do. It offers a counterfeit version of all four. Belonging through the crew. Identity through the reputation. Meaning through the mission. Mentorship through the older operator who takes an interest. To a teenager with none of those things in place, that offer is not stupid. It is logical. Prevention works when the real version reaches them first, through family, school, sport, faith and community, before a recruiter does.
We use a phrase a lot at the Dalgarno Institute: the difference between scaffolding and foundations. Tough laws and big seizures are scaffolding. They can hold a structure up for a while, and they matter. Foundations are slower, harder and far less photogenic. The family, the community, the sense of purpose that means a young person never finds the cartel’s offer attractive in the first place. Scaffolding without foundations only ever holds for so long. Dismantle one network and, where the underlying conditions are unchanged, another fills the vacuum, usually faster than the last one took to build.
The Work That Never Makes the News
Vietnam has chosen its model, and on the evidence of Thailand’s reversal it has chosen well. Keeping a drug culture from taking root is cheaper, kinder and more effective than dismantling one after it has formed. But the hardest part of that choice is not the enforcement that makes the headlines. It is the prevention that does not.
The Coconut Cartel is gone, and Vietnam’s borders are a little tighter this month. Both are worth something. But whether anything takes the cartel’s place, in Sydney, in Ho Chi Minh City or anywhere else, depends far less on the next law or the next crackdown than on the quiet, unglamorous work of drug prevention. Ultimately, the conversations in lounge rooms, classrooms and community halls that never make the news, but decide everything that does
(Source: WRD News)