KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 22 — Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail revealed today the district of Pendang in Kedah has the highest proportion of individuals involved in substance abuse nationwide, at over one in every 100 people there.

The home minister said Pendang’s figure came up to 1,333 per 100,000 people in the data from the Narcotics Criminal Investigation Department (NCID), indicating severe substance abuse amongst its populace.

“The national average is 432 out of 100,000 people and our target is to bring it below 400.

“Other districts with high numbers of substance abuse include those from the East Coast such as Dungun, Marang, Bachok, Machang, Besut and Kemaman,” he told a press conference at a special dialogue with the police held at Sime Darby Convention Centre here.

He said the figure was disclosed in a post-Cabinet meeting with the police’s NCID yesterday.

Saifuddin said the data was “as credible and complete as it gets” since it was sourced from four different stakeholders: NCID, the Health Ministry, the National Anti-Drugs Agency and private drugs rehabilitation centres.

“After four decades of waging war against drugs, there is a necessity to employ new elements in our approach as compared to previously.

“This programme serves as an opportunity for us to reposition ourselves and look into our current enforcement and competency of various law enforcement agencies in our present approach against drugs,” he said.

When asked if there were factors contributing to the high numbers of substance abuse in the aforementioned districts, Saifuddin conceded he was only able to make open-ended guesses.

“Give us more time to look into it but we have an idea now and we will deploy our enforcement agencies to focus on these areas for outreach programmes,” he said.

However, he said some clues could be gleaned from the granular data, which included information on ethnicity, education level, and household income.

“We find that overwhelmingly those involved in substance abuse were ethnic Malay possessing at least secondary education from the lower income bracket group and are either unemployed or self-employed,” he said.

On today’s event, Saifuddin said the programme aimed at discussing different approaches in dealing with the increasingly complex narcotic crime alongside the emergence of synthetic drugs.