While the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 of Malaysia has been amended to take into account changing patterns of drug abuse and trafficking, it lacks provisions for the mandatory forfeiture of proceeds derived from drug trafficking. Nor do the general powers of forfeiture in the Criminal Procedure Code of the country extend to such proceeds. To meet further changing patterns of drug trafficking involving criminal syndicate leaders, who rarely incriminate themselves through overt and detectable acts, Malaysia has a bill in Parliament the purpose of which, when it becomes law, is to detain without trial, upon cogent evidence, persons who have been associated with any activity relating to or involving drug trafficking, and to prevent them from further committing drug crimes. In addition, serious thinking has been given to the possibility of adopting, within the constraints of the Malaysian Constitution, a law on forfeiture of the proceeds derived from drug trafficking. There are, in this respect, several problems to be resolved, such as the secrecy of bank accounts and taxpayers' returns, which might make it difficult to trace proceeds and to keep track of tainted money being remitted abroad, although it is believed that such problems could be overcome by domestic measures. A more serious problem is the lack of international co-operation for investigations to be carried out outside national borders to trace, seize, freeze and secure the forfeiture of the proceeds of drug crimes located abroad.
The importance of penal measures in the control of drugs has been recognized by various Asian countries during the last three centuries. The countries of the Asian region referred to in this article have legislation providing for different penal measures against drug offences. Severe punitive sanctions, including the death penalty, have been prescribed for serious drug offences by Iran (Islamic Republic of), Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Several countries in the region have made legal provisions for the compulsory treatment and rehabilitation of drug dependent persons. There is, however, a paucity of research studies on the efficiency of penal measures and approaches in drug control. Given the long tradition of punitive measures and the wide variety of penal approaches adopted to cope with drug-related problems, various Asian countries can provide interesting cases for criminological research on the effectiveness of penal measures in combating drug problems.
In a comparative study of a group of experimental and control subjects in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, Jordan, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States of America (State of New York), and of the results of independent studies conducted in Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a rather close association was found to exist between drug abuse, criminal behaviour and social attitudes to such problems. Both drug abuse and the socio-legal systems varied greatly in the countries involved. No correlation was found between the level of foreseen or actual harshness of the socio-legal system and the level of seriousness of drug abuse and its associated criminality, but there was a significant correlation between knowledge of the law and the efficacy of the socio-legal system. In each country informal control systems, such as the family, church, school, neighbourhood and work environment, were active. Approximately one half of the subjects that were interviewed from countries with the most punitive socio-legal systems perceived informal controls as harsh and punitive while in the other countries such controls were generally perceived as positive. The study encouraged the review, testing and implementation of alternative measures to penal sanctions, particularly with a view to creating a genuine therapeutic approach to correcting the deviant behaviour of drug abusers.
Demand for pangolin scales in East Asia has increased dramatically in the past two decades, raising concern to the pangolin survival and bringing them to the brink of local extinction. Enumerating the number of individuals from the seized pangolin scales primarily goes undocumented, mostly due to the unavailability of the appropriate methods. In this study, we developed a Pangolin Indexing System, a multi-locus STR panel of eight dinucleotide microsatellites that showed promising results in individualization and assignment of scales into Chinese and Indian pangolins. The combined power of exclusion was 0.83 and 0.99 for Chinese and Indian pangolin. The select panel of eight polymorphic STRs exhibited the cumulative probability of identity 3.7 × 10-9 for Indian pangolin and 3.6 × 10-7 for Chinese pangolin and identified 51 unique genotypes from the 74 scales selected from the four pangolin seizures. The study demonstrated the first report of cross-species validation of STRs developed from Malayan pangolin to Indian pangolin and showed the potential application of Pangolin Indexing System in screening of large seizures through DNA profiling from the scales of Indian and Chinese pangolin.