Menace of drugs

The business is far too profitable to address from the supply side, and far too attractive from the demand side

The Prime Minister recently said the government would soon introduce a tough new anti-drug policy. While he gave no definitive timeline for when the new policy would be presented, some details were on offer. These included taking the input of the education and health ministries, and very likely the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) — since he was speaking at the inauguration of the ANF’s new headquarters. A positive detail was that the government would focus on awareness campaigns. This is important because we all know that punitive measures related to drug use rarely work.

The business is far too profitable to address from the supply side, and — for all the wrong reasons — far too attractive from the demand side. We also cannot use the shortcut of blaming Western culture. All four provinces have a long history of drug use embedded within the local culture, whether it be bhang, hashish, or opium. That is why awareness matters. Rather than using jail time to threaten people to not do drugs, we need to help them make educated decisions on why they should not be getting high. This is especially important when it comes to more powerful and refined drugs such as heroin or synthetics like methamphetamines, also known as ‘meth’ or ‘ice’.

Drugs function on a sliding scale, but blanket bans mean uninformed youngsters may not differentiate between them until they are already hooked. This is also where the PM contradicted his much more sound earlier position by claiming no attention was paid to drug eradication measures in the past. The fact of the matter is that those extreme eradication-based approaches are what got us here. While eradication efforts still matter, they need to be focused on high-value targets such as heroin and synthetics. This could be accomplished in part by removing jail penalties for the possession of small quantities of lesser drugs and replacing them with relatively low fines. This would let law enforcement focus on dealers and hard drugs while offering the added benefit of reducing police corruption. Despite the Premier’s apprehensions about Western culture, this approach has already shown success in many countries in the East and the West.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2020.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.