The Guyana Police Force should focus on stemming the flow of cocaine instead of going behind the drug users which can only make the situation worse, says a United Nations expert on the drug abuse fight.
According to Director of the Caribbean Institute of Drug and Alcohol Research Dr Marcus Day for some reason the police force spends a lot of time on enforcing the drug laws and the only thing that is achieved is the overcrowding of the prison population.
Dr Day is also chairman of the Caribbean Harm Reduction Coalition and the regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drug Crime,
Human rights
Dr Day, who has done much work in Guyana, said in an interview with Stabroek News that drug users are entitled to basic human rights and many times these are denied to them by the police during enforcement of the laws.
“But in fact it [enforcement of the laws] has just added to your prison population and has actually given a licence to the police to actually conduct drug raids with disregard to people’s basic human rights,” Dr Day said shortly after he had completed a two-day training programme on drug harm reduction organized by the Phoenix Recovery Project.
“You talk about drug users being entitled to human rights and when you say that people are actually astounded… The last time I checked they were humans and the last time I checked they were citizens of the country and so therefore they are entitled to rights just like everybody else,” he emphasized.
He told Stabroek News that all the police do is ratchet up the violence and when they do this the drugs users respond in kind.
“The police fire at the drug users, the drug users fire back; police use M16s, the drug users find grenades,” he said with a regretful nod of the head.
“It gets more and more ridiculous all the time. For what? In the name of protecting public health? I don’t think so. I think we have to stop and ratchet down the whole thing and redo it,” he suggested.
Day said his years of experience in the area have taught him that drugs are not as harmful as the laws that try to protect society from the substance and the prohibition against drugs, the criminality associated with it “and the state enforcement of drugs actually created more harms, more pain, more suffering than the actual substances that they seek to protect us from.
“Especially cannabis where it is basically an innocuous and harmless substance no matter what anybody has to say about it and all the propaganda and hype caused by a prohibitionist mentality… Cannabis is not a good thing, I don’t recommend people using cannabis but I surely don’t recommend people being incarcerated for cannabis.”
A waste
The UN employee is of the opinion that incarcerating persons for cannabis is a waste of resources and of prison space.
“Arresting somebody for a joint of cannabis, incarcerating them… As far as I am concerned by arresting someone for five pounds of cannabis and incarcerating them, they are not protecting society, they are not protecting me. They are not causing any danger to me and we are spending thousands and thousands of dollars and resources to send police after drug users…”
He said instead the effort should be focused on stemming the flow of cocaine and the huge quantities of cocaine that enter countries and not harass small petty users who live on the street.
“Truly the pain, suffering and harms that are associated with the drug laws far outweigh any pain, suffering and harm caused by the substance. So rather than solving the problem it has just made it worse,” Day argued.
According to the UN expert the war on drugs is a war on people and more so a war on vulnerable populations.
Day is a former teacher who later got involved in drug abuse treatment and became disillusioned that all the work that was being done to keep people off the street was basically ineffective. He said he later met someone who was running a project in the Caribbean on harm reduction back in 1998. He described the experience as a “mind blowing one” as it offered him job fulfilment.
He noted that 92% of the people who use drugs will continue to do so no matter what and providing other services to them is important. Day said that during his initial work in the Caribbean he found that a high percentage of persons were at risk for HIV or were infected and the services were not reaching them.
The substance abuse expert said the challenge for Guyana – a country he has visited on numerous occasions, travelling through its various communities – is that it is a resource-constrained environment and as such finding resources to work with a population that is “not particularly socially acceptable or sympathetic is always a challenge.
“I think within the context of a public health agenda, within the context of a human rights agenda where people are entitled to services and basic rights irrespective of who they are, I think they would be able to provide some sort of services for them.”
Ripples
Day pointed out that providing services to homeless people to make their lives less chaotic actually ripples out into the general community.
“When you have a small group of people whose lives are basically chaotic and that chaos actually ripples into the general community, when you make their lives less chaotic then you basically promote well-being within the entire community,” he asserted.
To better drive home his point, Day used the analogy of a human being stumping a little toe but yet it affects the entire body. He said homeless persons are a very small group of persons in society who create a lot of issues and as such if some of their needs are addressed then society benefits.
Meanwhile, during the recent two-day workshop held at Ocean View Hotel last week, Day said that the participants, who were from civil society and government agencies, discussed interventions for street drug users and how to address their needs in terms of HIV, other health and sanitary services and their basic biological needs.
Funding
For Day the training programme is not a one-off thing as he hopes that some funding could be indentified to start providing street-based and outreach services such as a “drop-in-centre, a place where people can come and get a bath, clothes, food…” He said Phoenix hopes to get the funding to establish such a centre which would be like a one-stop operation and they would partner with the Ministry of Health in acquiring the services of a visiting doctor, psychiatric nurse and various other services.
Meanwhile, Head of Phoenix Clarence Young said the two-day seminar was undertaken as a result of his organization’s need to take hope, care and treatment, even if merely palliative, to those who for varying reasons, including stigmatization, discrimination and lack of finances, cannot access treatment.
It was hoped that the seminar would establish the need for early intervention at the street level; examine the concept of minimizing the social and health consequences of the individual and prepare Guyana for the eventuality of injecting drug users (IDUs).
Young said the inclusion of the last objective is justified by the increase in deportations and migratory movements of nationals and adopting as it were elements of drug culture.
Further, Young said the onus is upon everyone to reach out, employing whatever resources are at their disposal to extend the elusive hand of help to an ever increasing population of homeless, mentally ill, abandoned elderly, children, indigent, community rejects, and those made homeless by other factors such as deportation, fire and eviction.
Young said history is filled with evidence of caregivers’ attempts to alleviate or eradicate the adverse effects drugs have had on those afflicted. He said that never before have so many people sought comfort in such painful discomfort and at such alarming levels. He said that the phenomenon of the “unwanted guest” refusing to leave, begs redress.
“This has to be premised on the bold acknowledgement that the devastating toll on human capital is without parallel, and can only be countered by a holistic approach that takes into account all the objective and subjective factors at play,” Young said.
More importantly, Young said, something has to be done and soon, pointing out that the fact that social and health consequences are glaringly obvious, is testimony to inadequate attempts to address the scourge of drugs on the demand side of the equation.
