A practical solution

re: "Mafia pull alive and well" (BP, Editorial, December 5, 2022) 

Dear editor,

The Bangkok Post is right to be concerned about the scale of criminal gang operations in Thailand by foreigners attracted by the profits to be made. It is perhaps sobering to reflect that such foreign business successes are likely dwarfed by the more smoothly running local Thai mafia gangs and loyal officials also eagerly raking in the billions to be had. It might, therefore, be more constructive to ask what it is that contributes to making Thailand a hub of such gang-led criminal activity. I would suggest that the major answer is Thai law. 

In 1920, the US criminalized alcohol. The result was not that millions of law abiding citizens, or at least citizens who saw themselves as being generally law-abiding, upstanding members of their community suddenly stopped drinking. Well, they did, but not for very long. After an initial, dramatic drop in 1921, alcohol consumption by generally law-abiding, upstanding members of their community, now all officially criminals, rapidly returned to their pre-Prohibition drug drinking habits. In 1919, per capita alcohol consumption in the US was just under 0.8 gallons/person. In 1921, this plunged to a little over 0.2 gallons/person. In 1922, it soared to actually exceed the pre-Prohibition level of 1919 (Clark Warburton, The Economic Results of Prohibition. Columbia University Press, 1932, pp. 23–26, 72).

Of course, what America's experiment with criminalizing the sale and use of alcohol proved was that decent people often strongly demand what those misled by good intentions righteously deem bad for everyone. When denied the opportunity to legally purchase regulated, safe products from legal, responsible business people, the good citizens of the US turned in their masses to the mafia gangs, enabling those criminal institutions to get a solid footing in American law enforcement, judiciary and government — not exactly all that righteous. 

The recent Thai saga of Tuhao, or Chaiyanat Kornchayanant as he is known, illustrates exactly the same phenomena. Millions of Thai and Chinese customers, who not only think of themselves as being decent, law-abiding people who want a bit of fun, and whose bit of fun in almost all cases does not harm anyone save themselves, are eager customers for the likes of foreigners such as Tuhao, and even more so for the Joe Ferraris and others in the Royal Thai Police and other Royal Thai law enforcement bodies serving the local criminal gangs who are getting rich beyond their official salaries' dreams. As reported, Tuhao naturally appears to have all the requisite law enforcement and political connections to ensure high profits.

No business person, Thai or foreign, legal or criminal, ever got rich by selling a product for which there was no demand. The most practical partial solution to the corruption as usual in the Royal Thai Police and elsewhere, which no one who supports the regressive status quo over progressive reform will ever tackle, irrespective of incredible promises, is to at least decriminalize all those activities so beloved of the Thai people that they are staunch customers irrespective of legality. If those inherently unjust laws were reformed, that would immediately put a major dent in the income streams of foreign and local criminal gangs and corrupt Thai officials, which is perhaps the reason those groups so oppose sane law. Such reform of obviously failing law would also greatly reduce the harms to society caused by having the sex industry, the drug industry, the gambling industry and so on run not by regulated, tax-paying business people who could be held to account, but by criminal gangs and corrupt officials getting rich at great cost to Thai society. 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on December 8, 2022, under the title "A practical solution" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2455577/just-fine-in-theory