DRUG-USE IS NOT A MAJOR PROBLEM IN OUR SCHOOLS

Sep 18, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

I am not too concerned about drug use in our school system. I have reservations about the findings of a survey done last year which suggests that drug use is prevalent in our school system more so in the private schools than in the public school system.
My reservations are based on the methodology. If you are going to use a questionnaire to ascertain drug use in our school system, you are likely to have exaggerated findings. There will be some school children, particularly boys who will boast that they use drugs when in fact they have never smoked even a cigarette. It makes them seem manlier if they admit to using drugs and therefore there is going to be bias in the results provided.
I am not going to accept that we have a serious drug-use problem in our schools. Teachers have always been able to know when students use drugs. They see it in their eyes and in their behaviour. The drug-use problem I suspect is more prevalent in the post—school years. But I do not believe that it is as bad as it is being painted.
I have never seen a junkie in school. I have however seen junkies in most communities around Guyana. Yet we have not had any survey about drug-use in communities but we are learning about persons from as young as 12 years old using drugs in school. That is hard to believe. It is more likely that one 12-year-old admitted to drug use on a questionnaire.
In an area in Berbice called Canefield, Canje, young men are openly smoking marijuana. All you have to do is to stand on any road corner any evening, and young men will ride pass you leaving behind the pungent smell associated with the smoking of marijuana. These are not school boys, they are young men and they have access to marijuana.
The problem is in the communities. It is not as bad as it is being made out in the schools. There are drug-houses where drugs are sold. The police are not doing a good job of moving against these drug-houses. If they were doing a better job, the young boys would not be so brazen.
It is hard to comprehend why the police are not moving more swiftly against the drug dealers within communities.
International organizations have a vested interest however in representing that there is a problem with drug–use in our schools. Such a diagnosis paves the way for them to initiate some initiative action. These initiatives are what allow these international organizations to show their donors that they are serving some useful purpose. They know that it is easier to have an intervention done in a school rather than taking on the more arduous task of solving the drug use problem in communities.
I am more concerned about school children having sex than them using drugs. I am more concerned about gangs in schools. I am more concerned about the safety of teachers in the school system. I am more concerned with the spread of infectious diseases in school than I am about drug-use.
These are the problems that need immediate attention. These are the problems that should be absorbing the attention of local educators and those international organizations that exist, simply because they can represent to their donors that poor Third World countries need help to deal with social problems.
Guyana can solve its own problems. The first step in doing so is to keep these international organizations out of the country’s business and allow the local authorities to solve these problems without all these fancy studies and surveys whose findings are highly questionable. Let some of them go and solve the problems in their own country before attempting to do so here.

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DRUG-USE IS NOT A MAJOR PROBLEM IN OUR SCHOOLS

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