It is understandable, this local war on drugs. Lives have been ruined by the drug habit and many more are in the process of being ruined. As a result of which, some zeal and some iron-resolve is expected when fighting drug runners and other unscrupulous elements that run the business.
But yet, however determined the State actors may be, the zeal to bring offenders under control should not spill over as harassment of ordinary citizens. The Police it seems always have other ideas. Or at least some gentlemen in the Police Force do. This is why social media is chock-full of takes these days about law-abiding youth being made to strip by overzealous policemen, and about young women being asked to open their handbags, though no female Police officers are present.
However worthy a cause may be, it cannot degenerate into a clamping down on civil liberties. We have been here before. The war on terrorism and bomb attacks on State-owned facilities such as airports and railway stations and other random targets made checkpoints and random roadside checks of civilians inevitable. At no time did civilians negotiate this type of inconvenience easily. There were cases of ordinary folk being shot at checkpoints, because they were probably distracted and did not see the signals to stop.
APPLAUDED
We are past that now, and a new generation particularly has the legitimate expectation that they would be able to get about their normal business unmolested by Law Enforcement looking for drug runners and various shady characters involved in the narcotics trade.
It is true that civilians and particularly parents who are living anxiously hoping that their children wouldn’t be dragged into the habit by pushers and other agents of drug traffickers, need to be rid of this menace. It is also true that the narcotics business has other spin-off effects such as a spike in crime due to addiction related incidents, and a dangerous trend towards narco-violence where drug mafiosi rule the roost.
Society has to be reclaimed, even though we are fortunate to be spared the bizarre cartel related violence that prevails in some South American jurisdictions for instance, where drug runners practically run certain countries or at least parts of them. The iron-resolve of the authorities needs to be applauded. But there are caveats, and they are important ones.
Simply put, cracking down is a complex equation and all aspects ought to be considered. Among the best examples of the negative effects of indiscriminate cracking down can be found in the Netherlands, a developed country. When certain types of narcotics were made illegal in that country, drug runners were the first to benefit. When open-trading went underground, they sprung into action and started providing the drugs through illegal channels to those who are addicted and to those whom they targeted as future addicts.
The drug problem in the Netherlands is now worse than when the crackdown in earnest began. The Mayor of Amsterdam now says that the Netherlands is at risk of becoming a narco-State. International criminalisation has made the drug trade more lucrative, she says.
The Netherlands had a tradition of ignoring the use of so-called recreational drugs, and possession of hard drugs in very small quantities such as milligrams was not prosecuted. She cautions that substantial parts of the Dutch economy would be taken over by illegal drug money because Dutch cities such as Amsterdam have become veritable hubs for dealing in narcotics.
A party drug called MDMA which was relatively harmless was suddenly categorised as a dangerous drug in the Netherlands and made into a hard drug that falls under the Opium Act. This, says the Mayor, created a lucrative business model for criminal organisations. The global crackdown on hard drugs and the total and absolute criminalisation of narcotics is therefore not necessarily the answer to the drug problem.
This sort of criminalisation started creating more addicts and more young people who were lured into the habit by underground gangs. Drug related violence quadrupled. Now, believe it or not, as an alternative to unsuccessful crackdowns, certain countries in Europe are contemplating legal sales of cocaine.
In Switzerland legal sales of cannabis are now allowed though on a trial basis. The simple reason is that legalisation and control under legalised conditions proved to be a better solution than driving the dangerous drugs trade totally underground, creating narco sub-economies and countries veering ever so closer to becoming fully fledged narco-states where the narcotics mafiosi determine drug prices and channeled ill-gotten money into the legal economy.
None of the above is to suggest that Sri Lanka should indiscriminately legalise certain drugs that are currently considered dangerous. But, it is to say that any war on drugs has various ramifications which need to be considered very carefully before a full-on battle on drug barons and other drug mafiosi is undertaken.
The civil liberties aspect is also by every reckoning, important. Some 7,000 civilians were killed during President Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror against drug peddlers in the Philippines.
Some of those who were killed may have been drug barons and big-time drug runners, but was the impunity that obtained in the Philippines during Duterte’s onslaught worth it? They say the proliferation of drugs in the country decreased during Duterte’s Presidency, but also as President he was so consumed by the campaign that he exaggerated the data to indicate to the people via the media that the country is becoming a narco-State.
Researchers and journalists who carried out extensive fact-finding on Duterte’s war on drugs found that there was massive drug proliferation in prisons after Duterte indiscriminately flung suspects in jail.
They also discovered that those who managed to survive the Police dragnet by various means using the power of money and connections, became stronger after the weaker and less powerful pushers were either eliminated in extra-judicial killings, or sentenced to serve jail time.
These unexpected developments that dented the effectiveness of Duterte’s campaign was in addition to the bad rap that Philippines got in terms of upholding human rights. That negativity was not entirely undeserved because enormous suffering had been caused to the families of innocents who were killed by so-called vigilante squads, because of the then prevailing climate of impunity that Duterte’s drug war fostered.
LUCRATIVE
All of this goes to show that drug wars are good in theory but though well-intentioned may not always end up yielding positive results in practice.
In the Philippines Duterte’s successor moved away from the ruthless war on narcotics and adopted a more rehabilitation and prevention based approach. We in this Asian island are not the Netherlands or an European country, and we would find it hard to make the mental leap to have trials legalising some hard drugs so that they do not go underground and in fact benefit drug runners who make use of the situation to create narco-hubs that trade in narcotics that are banned, because they become a sought after commodity for addicts.
Therefore, culturally we may as a first resort think a tough line and a tough line only would do. That is fine too, but at some point it is seen to all go awry and go overboard and the net result is oftentimes something that was never expected.
Under these circumstances drug wars need to be well thought-out and alternate courses of action need to be well thought-out too. This is by no means to condone hard drugs and those who deal in these narcotics especially when they are illegal. Opioids and various types of narcotics are sometimes a lucrative trade precisely because they are illegal.
All that can be said is that the issue of hard drugs is extremely complicated. Linearly thought-out solutions may not always work. The lessons from the Netherlands, the Philippines. can be taken. Certainly there can be no one-track-mindedness that condones Police excesses.
