Drug test results announced for Phuket’s defense volunteers

There’s been a drug testing campaign for defense volunteers in Phuket this week. The police chief of Phuket’s main city district led the campaign.

The chief, Suwit Suriyawong, said that all the defense volunteers tested negative for drugs. He told The Phuket Express…

“The campaign is to ensure that these defense volunteers who are working with us are not involved with any illegal drugs. We also want to make sure that they are ready to work with other disciplines.”

Drug checks are being carried out across Thailand after last week’s horrific massacre at a daycare centre in northeast Thailand. Although no traces of drugs were detected in his body, police say the killer had a history of drug abuse, namely with meth.

Just one day after the massacre, another man was stopped and arrested before he could commit a similar act. In the Southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, an inebriated armed man was arrested near a school trying to grab his child.

The man argued with his wife before storming off under the influence of alcohol to his child’s school in the Ron Phibun district. Armed with two guns and a supply of bullets, and about 20 meth pills, he intended to pull the child out of school after the domestic dispute.

Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has now declared a war on drugs and a clampdown on gun control laws.

The Royal Thai Police are wasting no time in meeting General Prayut’s demands, seizing 8.6 million meth pills from the streets of Lampang and Tak provinces in the space of three days.

In Phuket, an off-duty police officer was reportedly spotted walking around carrying a gun and “acting erratically” in a housing estate on Monday. Police seized from him a gun loaded with seven bullets, and eight bullets in his pockets. Police said that the man faces charges of carrying a gun in public without reason. The man was to be drug tested for possible further prosecution.

The world watches as Thai authorities scramble to fix what appears to be an insidious problem.