Latest update April 27th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 06, 2011 Editorial
So another ship emanating from Guyana has been intercepted (this time in Jamaica) with drugs. If we ever needed it, this is more confirmation that Guyana is an established trans-shipment point for drugs.
While there has been a lot of finger pointing on the issue, it is not to exculpate anyone or any one agency to point out that any programme to tackle drug trafficking in Guyana, has to be part of a wider international effort.
Back in 1998, the UN General Assembly had unleashed an agenda for achieving a “drug-free world” by the next decade. For good measure the representatives also committed to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and marijuana.
The aspirational gap between the “drug-free world” and “significantly reducing” supplies, perhaps suggested that they were more realistically hedging their bets. In 2008, reviewing the complete failure in approaching much less achieving their goals, the Ministers ruefully proposed that they indulge in “a year of reflection”.
What are some of the facts that they might have chewed over? Worldwide, drug use has remained remarkably constant: the few countries that have shown some decreases are more than matched by increases elsewhere – including some locations like Guyana that were previously insignificant.
The UN estimates (that’s all it can do, since by definition an illegal activity is mostly “underground”) that two-hundred million drug users worldwide spend approximately US$320 billion to get their “fixes”. The US remains the number one drug destination with the corresponding number one spot for drug users – even though it reportedly spends a whopping US$40 billion annually on their “war on drugs”.
Many countries, such as Mexico, are on the verge of becoming “failed states” because of the infiltration of drug lords into governance. Columbia retains its top billing as a producer of cocaine while over in Asia, with pressure on heroin producers in Turkey and Thailand, production has switched to Myanmar and Afghanistan.
With the mind-boggling profits to be made between the producer states and the top markets which coincide with the top developed states, crackdowns on drug-lords both in producing and transhipment states only result in newer and slicker (not to mention deadlier) ones taking their place.
The rise of Afghanistan as a top-line producer state coincides with the intertwining of drugs and terrorism: the latter thrives on the quick and liquid funds that the former provides.
As one report noted: “The international traffic in illicit drugs contributes to terrorist risk through at least five mechanisms: supplying cash, creating chaos and instability, supporting corruption, providing “cover” and sustaining common infrastructures for illicit activity, and competing for law enforcement and intelligence attention. Of these, cash and chaos are likely to be the two most important.”
So what was to be done? In 2009, fresh from their year’s reflection, Ministers from fifty-four countries met in Vienna at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to decide on a course of action for the next decade. As is usual with problems that involve supply and demand, the country with the highest demand – the US was in the forefront of defining the issue The Europeans, supported by the Latin American countries that had borne the brunt of violence of the “war on drugs”, felt that the war had ignominiously been lost.
They proposed that a new approach was needed. They suggested that maybe the problem of drugs should be defined as a “public health” issue where the focus would be on “harm reduction”. This, of course, would mean an end of prohibition and the ‘war on drugs”.
On the other side, countries such as the United States, China and Russia think the phrase “harm reduction” was too broad, and quickly had it removed from the draft text of the official declaration.
So we are once again in the midst of a continuation of the (already failed) “war on drugs”. And those countries like Guyana that have no resources to fight such a war have been conscripted to do battle whether they like it or not. And the finger pointing continues.
Govt. on its knees over a year now for US$646M to ease Blackouts, and one Canadian Company…
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