President Bharrat Jagdeo, Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee and Commissioner of Police Henry Greene all took time to talk about the country’s war on drugs in their respective addresses to the Guyana Police Force’s Annual Officers Conference last week.

The President told the police officers that, while there have been “some successes against the bigger drug lords,” he had not seen enough effort by the Force in tackling the drug houses. He confided, “We know them − the ones that sell drugs in our communities − we know them; they are there. We need to go after them aggressively because these are the ones who are peddling the deaths in our communities… They are responsible for all the addicts that are living in our country and are keeping the drug trade alive.”

The Commissioner of Police, as if to prove that the Force had evinced “enough effort,” reported that 107 “drug houses” had been targeted, 3,698 searches had been done and 251 persons had been charged for trafficking in cannabis sativa and 83 for cocaine since the last Officers’ Conference. The Minister of Home Affairs, for his part, told the officers that they needed “to engage more robust efforts to interdict drug-traffickers − especially the major traffickers.”

Everyone knows, however, that successes in the prosecution of “the bigger drug lords” were achieved only by law enforcement agencies outside of this jurisdiction. Guyanese Peter Morgan was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for drug-trafficking earlier this month in the USA. David Narine, another Guyanese, was sentenced to time served for drug-trafficking, also in the USA. Former Guyana Defence Force Major David Clarke was sentenced to time served for drug-trafficking in the USA. Guyana’s drug-trafficking mastermind Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan was sentenced to 15 years last year for drug-trafficking in the USA. Six Guyanese – Rohan Shastri Rambarran, Lemme Michael Campbell, Somwattie Persaud, Wayne Gavin Green, Christopher Bacchus and Dianne Bacchus – were all convicted for drug-trafficking last year in Barbados.

It seems clear that, as the US Department of State’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report iterates every year, “Guyana is a transshipment point for South American cocaine on its way to North America and Europe.” Simply, this country has become an entrepôt from which Guyanese drug-traffickers export their merchandise to foreign markets. It is clear, also, that “the bigger drug lords” have never been brought to justice in this jurisdiction.

How serious are the President, Minister and Commissioner about their war on drugs? Ought they not to tell the police officers why the administration’s main counter-narcotics strategy − the National Drug Strategy Master Plan for 2005-2009 − expired without achieving its objectives? Shouldn’t they explain what Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon meant five years ago when he said that the Guyana Government was “engaged in discussion” with the US administration about the establishment of a United States Drug Enforcement Agency Office in Guyana?

Don’t the officers need to know about the investigations of the drug cartel that constructed the huge 1,100 m-long, illegal airstrip – on which a partially-burnt aeroplane capable of transporting 1,615 kg of cocaine – was found at Wanatoba, on the Corentyne River in 2007?  Isn’t this one way by which huge volumes of drugs are continuously brought into the country? Isn’t this how the trade thrives and is kept alive?

The efficacy of the administration’s war on drug-trafficking cannot be assessed realistically by reliance on the Commissioner’s factoids about small-scale searches and seizures. The facts are that the present law enforcement strategy still permits “the bigger drug lords” to prosper and, in the President’s own words, does not prevent traffickers from “peddling the deaths in our communities.”