Dear Editor,
Minister Clement Rohee gleefully points out at the anti-narcotics meeting that Guyana spends about $900M annually in the war on drugs in Guyana. He stated that this was equivalent to 1.9 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Minister compared Guyana’s spending to the USA to highlight a striking difference. The Minister claims the USA spends $12.7B per annum, which amounts to 0.9 per cent of that country’s GDP. We must thank the Minister for pointing out this startling fact. Imagine a third world economy is spending more per capita than the mighty USA particularly when the same mighty USA vehemently criticizes that third world country for its intransigence on battling the bloated drug trade in Guyana, which is now the best feature of the local economy. But here is where Minister Rohee’s moment of proud gloating comes crashing down. The guilty pleas and convictions of Roger Khan, David Clarke and Peter Morgan in the USA bring it down. Despite spending more of its GDP fighting drugs, the Guyana government could not convict these known drug traffickers and kingpins. Every year the USA obtains by extradition and convicts numerous high and mid-level drug traffickers and cartel bosses. And yes, Mr Rohee, the USA actually captures and convicts thousands of its local drug traffickers every year. In Guyana, these individuals have achieved untouchable status.
Mr Rohee’s boast gets downright hollow when faced with the fact that the USA spends more per capita than Guyana caring for, treating and rehabilitating its local population of addicts. The army of addicts in Guyana runs amok in Guyana engaging in criminality in a land of crime. It begins its descent into comedy when one considers that the USA spends quite a bit of that money abroad too in other nations and not all of it in the USA. Mr Rohee suffers from the same delusion as his government which believes that spending money is equal to getting value for money and getting results. A lot of money is spent on waste, incompetence, inefficiency, corruption in this nation. There are no results from it. The point that Minister Rohee really wanted to make was that the USA was supremely more efficient, less wasteful and got significantly more results than Guyana which spent more money on average. Yes, Mr Rohee unequivocally emphasized the failure of the Guyana drug fight. The USA is doing significantly more with substantially less and it is doing it all over the world. The big-spending PPP has convicted zero major drug traffickers while the USA has convicted two. And this was after taking time off from, among other things, helping the Colombian anti-drug campaign, convicting Manuel Noreiga and putting Jamaica’s version of Roger Khan in the form of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke on trial. Has any nation ever spent 1.9% of its GDP on absolutely nothing?
Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell
