Former CARICOM Assistant Secretary-General Dr Edward Greene on Wednesday told a conference of leaders from eight Caribbean universities that drug abuse should be considered a human rights issue and a ‘human rights approach’ should be adopted to address the problem.
“Our response could be more effective if we integrate human rights principles and obligations into prevention and treatment of drug offenders,” Greene said, in the keynote address at Le Meridien Pegasus in Kingston, Jamaica, where he outlined several challenges in fighting drug abuse. He stressed the need to be creative in designing, implementing and sustaining viable programmes and policies to respond to the drug phenomenon, the CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, stated in a news release. The conference brought together leaders from eight Caribbean universities and representatives from governments and international organisations to focus on the preparation of students to tackle the social, economic and criminal consequences of the drug problem in the Caribbean, especially in the demand reduction field, the release stated.
Greene asserted that there was need to explore options for creative approaches to achieving an accelerated approach to drug abuse, especially in light of scarce resources. He also said that the regional strategy on drug demand reduction should have a sub-component that deals with drug abuse prevention and to ensure that the strategy was embedded in the priorities of the Council for Human and Social Development.
He challenged the conference to find ways to enhance collaboration in programme delivery and research; promote regional programmes with national impact; engage in training and research especially at the tertiary levels; and incorporate information and communication technologies into the solutions. “In the final analysis,” Greene said, “drug prevention requires champions for change who emerge as leaders at all levels of the delivery spectrum.” He added: “If we start with the fact that we are all responsible—and indeed that we are all leaders in this venture—then we are on our way to comprehending that the solution revolves around building and preserving the human condition and facilitating the sustainability of the human rights approach to drug abuse. The future demands it. The youth of the region for whom we need to change the environment and to overcome the challenges require that we invest now in creative endeavours to prevent drug abuse.”
The three-day conference in Jamaica was organised by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) of the Secretariat of Multidimensional Security of the Organisation of American States (OAS), in tandem with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat. It was funded by the Govern-ment of Canada, the European Union and the United States of America. The University of the West Indies and Jamaica’s National Council on Drug Abuse were also key support partners in this conference.
Greene, who is also the Advisor to the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA), noted that the critical challenges being faced by Caribbean governments related to the alarming high rates of crime and violence in the region could be traced back to drug trafficking. This drug trade, he pointed out, drove crime in a number of ways, chief of which were the violence tied to trafficking, normalising illegal behaviour, diverting criminal justice resources from other activities, provoking property crime, contributing to widespread availability of firearms, undermining and corrupting societal institutions and exacerbating youth violence.
Coupled with those, he said were the problems associated with drug addiction, which are also threats to development.
Education
Meanwhile, in her remarks at the conference, Myrna Bernard, the CARICOM Secretariat’s Officer-in-Charge of the Directorate of Human and Social Develop-ment said that the meeting provided an opportunity for some of the major actors in tertiary education system in the region to examine and clarify roles of the sector and plan concrete initiatives to address the execution of those roles.
Bernard acknowledged the important role which education plays in combating drug use had long been realised. “In our regional context where health and social-care services might not adequately be geared or oriented toward provision of appropriate demand reduction activities, education programmes within schools and institutions are the mainstay of drug demand reduction,” Bernard observed.
And while the meeting was putting the focus on universities in the region, Bernard asserted that “we need also to recognise that other tertiary institutions in the region, in particular our community colleges, influence a large number of students in our region.” She stated, “The principal target for drug demand reduction programmes is the cadre of young people both in and out of school.”
At the regional level, she noted, drug prevention education has been incorporated into programmes for the promotion of healthy lifestyles and, in particular, the regional Health and Family Life Education (HFLE) programme. Within the past year, this programme has been revisited in order to strengthen the mainstreaming of drug demand issues. This was supported under the European Union 9th European Development Fund (EDF) programme.
Specific challenges, however, relate to both the technical competence and the willingness of teachers to address some of the sensitive issues within these programmes. The shortage of human resources in the specific area of drug demand reduction within the region was identified as far back as 2000, when the Regional Drug Demand Reduction Strategy was developed.
Bernard said further that much effort had been made over the ensuing years to address this challenge through discrete training programmes and workshops addressing specific elements related to reducing the demand for drugs or drug addiction, including capacity building for national drug councils facilitated recently within the 9th EDF programme.
The conference was aimed to focus on functional cooperation as proposals are elaborated for collaboration among universities in the Caribbean in preparing professionals to deal with the complexities of drug issues in their fields. It was also expected to explore the best modalities for coordination across the region through a collaborative arrangement with the OAS/CICAD and CARICOM. It was expected that the discussions would also benefit from the knowledge, experiences and perspectives of experts from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, and others.
