I am glad that the ASEAN Training Center for Preventive Drug Education happens to celebrate its twentieth anniversary today. For it enables me to share this moment with you.

I have come to Manila for the summit meeting of ASEAN's leaders and their meeting with their counterparts from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea and for the series of meetings leading up to them. This afternoon, I return to Jakarta, where ASEAN's headquarters is located.

Yesterday, the heads of state and government of ASEAN gathered for what has now become their annual summit. For the first time, all ten Southeast Asian nations met at an ASEAN summit, Cambodia having been admitted into ASEAN as its tenth member last April.

At their meeting, the ASEAN leaders reviewed the state of their economies and found that they are firmly on the path of recovery, with all of them set to record positive growth rates of up to six percent in 1999. They viewed the immediate prospects of the ASEAN economy with cautious optimism. They saw a gathering momentum in economic growth, provided that the ASEAN countries persist in their reform measures and prudent policies and provided that the economies of their leading trading partners remain strong as in the case of the United States or continue to recover as in the case of Japan or continue to move forward as in the case of the European Union. The leaders also confronted the more long-term question of how ASEAN will fare in the first few decades of the coming century.

ASEAN has for some time recognized five things about the world that is fast evolving around us. The first is that goods, capital and information are moving more and more freely around the world. The second is related to the first, and that is that technology is not only making possible the increasingly rapid movement of goods, capital and information; technology is also changing at bewildering and ever-greater speed. The third is that, in the light of this phenomenon of globalization and rapid technological change, nation-states other than those of continental scale cannot hope to compete for markets and investments unless they coalesce together in larger integrated economies. The fourth is that in the new industrial era that is dawning the future belongs to the knowledge-based industries, industries related to technology, information, communications, electronics, and so on. The fifth is that in such an era brains count far more than hands and that progress, prosperity and, indeed, survival depend on the success of nations, societies and individuals in acquiring the skills and the training necessary for the new industries.

At their summit yesterday, the ASEAN leaders devoted some time to the subject of an e-ASEAN; that is, an electronic ASEAN, an ASEAN that is linked together electronically, an ASEAN that uses information and communications technology to be more efficient, productive and competitive, an ASEAN that develops more and more of the modern technology that it needs, an ASEAN that is competitive in the knowledge industries, an ASEAN that has the institutions and, above all, the people to enable it to be all of this.

This means that people have to be knowledgeable and skilled and trained in the industries of today and tomorrow. The ASEAN leaders thus spent a great deal of time talking about HRD, human resource development. ASEAN realizes that HRD is the key to surviving in and keeping up with the world of technology that is fast unfolding -- HRD as the development of the skills and the abilities, the mind-sets and the attitudes of its people, especially the young.

This was also a major subject of the ASEAN leaders' discussions with their counterparts from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea yesterday -- how ASEAN and those three Northeast Asian countries can cooperate in developing their human resources, how they can assist one another in enabling their people to contribute to and benefit from the new industrial resurgence that has begun to sweep the world.

What does all this have to do with preventive drug education?

Well, drug abuse is the exact antithesis of HRD. It promotes stupor in place of alertness and concentration. It breaks down physical health and the mental faculties instead of building them up. It engenders cynicism and a sense of hopelessness instead of confidence and creativity. It breeds dependency in place of self-confidence and intellectual independence. It is closely associated with the spread of HIV/AIDS. It diverts resources to law-enforcement, treatment and rehabilitation and away from research and education.

The prevention and control of drug abuse in ASEAN is thus directly linked to ASEAN's ability to compete, to advance and even to survive in an increasingly globalized and competitive world.

It is because of the impact of drugs on creativity and productivity, as well as on the moral fiber of individuals and societies, that ASEAN began cooperating on the prevention and control of drug abuse early in its existence. This was one of the earliest forms of ASEAN cooperation.

In 1972, just five years after ASEAN's founding in Bangkok in 1967, the ASEAN Experts Group Meeting on the Prevention and Control of Drug Abuse convened as the main vehicle for ASEAN to work together in fighting the scourge of drugs. This forum was re-named in 1984 as the ASEAN Senior Officials on Drug Matters, or ASOD.

Through almost three decades, ASEAN officials have worked among themselves and with other countries, educational institutions and non-governmental organizations on concrete measures embodied in plans of action and work programs. Much of this work has focused on demand reduction, and thus on prevention, and on education as a means of prevention. Indeed, six of the ten projects in the current work program of ASOD, adopted in 1996, have to do with demand reduction, and four of the six have to do with preventive drug education.

In this sense, this training center is a major instrument in ASEAN's collective fight against drug abuse. It has helped the ASEAN countries to design effective prevention programs, develop tools for evaluating such programs, and establish networks of parents and young people for preventing drug use among the young. One of its earlier projects, done in 1982, was a series of workshops on drug education for teachers and curriculum designers, which eventually produced a prototype curriculum for preventive drug education at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. The center's courses have equipped several generations of teachers, social workers and others dedicated to this work with the necessary skills for it.

The center works with similar institutions in other parts of Southeast Asia. The ASEAN Training Center for Narcotics Law Enforcement in Bangkok has trained narcotics officers in narcotics laws and their enforcement and in investigation techniques. The ASEAN Training Center for Treatment and Rehabilitation in Kuala Lumpur has conducted courses in counselling for the region's drug-control agencies. The ASEAN Training Center for Research on the detection of drugs and body fluids in Singapore has run courses in laboratory management and drug-detection techniques and provided ASEAN members with drug-testing equipment. The functions of the four ASEAN centers reflect the four main concerns of ASOD's nearly three decades of work -- preventive education and information, treatment and rehabilitation, law-enforcement, and research.

ASOD works with other ASEAN bodies. Today, ASEAN is seeking to integrate its areas of cooperation with one another -- trade and finance, the economy and the environment, security and development, the economy and human resource development, science and technology with the economy and human resources. It is doing no less in the fight against drug abuse. For example, the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information has conducted training programs for journalists and sponsored an exhibition for children aimed at the spread of information about the dangers of drug use. Drug trafficking is a major target of the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Trans-national Crime and its subsidiary bodies. The Chiefs of National Police and the ASEAN Sub-Committee on Youth are also involved in the work of preventing and controlling drug abuse. The ASEAN Secretariat, of course, supports the work of ASOD and of other ASEAN bodies in the fight against drug abuse.

This work, including the work of this center, has received valuable support also from ASEAN's dialogue partners and international agencies, notably the European Commission, the United States, the Colombo Plan, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations International Drug Control Programme, and the International Labor Organization.

ASEAN's political leaders are fully committed to the ASEAN struggle against drug abuse. In June 1976, the ASEAN Foreign Ministers -- only five of them at that time -- issued the ASEAN Declaration of Principles to Combat the Abuse of Narcotic Drugs, which gave the political direction to ASEAN's work in this area. The 1997 statement of ASEAN Vision 2020 envisioned a Southeast Asia free of illicit drugs, free of their production, processing, trafficking and use. In July 1998, here in Manila, the ASEAN Foreign Ministers issued the Joint Declaration for a Drug-Free ASEAN, which lays down a wide range of measures to put the leaders' vision of a drug-free ASEAN into effect.

The ASEAN Training Center for Preventive Drug Education is a vital force in the fulfilment of our leaders' vision of a drug-free ASEAN and of their mandate to make it a reality. I congratulate the center on its twentieth anniversary and wish it more success into the next century.