Young drug couriers and the implications

Nov 11, 2015 Editorial

Someone once wrote that youth is wasted on the young, and this may very well be the case, because of the number of young people who seem bent on making a mess of their lives – oblivious to the fact that they more than likely have years and years ahead of them.
We have been constantly regaled with news about the arrests of young drug mules. One would expect such persons, many of them relatively well educated, to be aware of right and wrong; of the likely outcome for doing something that the society would frown upon, and for which there are significant penalties.
The entire world refuses to take kindly to the movement of drugs and even the consumption. We in tiny and poverty-stricken Guyana have seen the effects of narcotics on hapless users, all of whom, at the start, were certain that they would never become addicted.
Very few of us in the society have managed to escape the approaches of one of these drug addicts who from time to time have been using various ploys to get us to fork over hard-earned cash. Their excuses range from being HIV-infected to having been stranded in the city and needing a fare to get home. Of course, the very next day we would see these unfortunate souls using the same excuse, sometimes making the mistake of approaching us a second time.
But back to those youths who get busted trafficking in narcotics. They are taken into custody and sometimes it turns out that they are so young the media is castigated for revealing their identity – the critics likening the revelations to something akin to a death penalty, but forgetting that the perpetrators were involved in a most criminal act.
In most societies there are crimes that dictate that the perpetrators be tried as adults, and while British common law differs markedly from American jurisprudence, none could forget that the American media spare no pains in revealing the identity of young offenders who try to either directly or indirectly, destroy other Americans. The only time age is a possible consideration is in relation to the death penalty.
In Guyana, we have gone to great lengths to identify young people charged with other heinous crimes, such as those involved in fatal carjackings and rape, etc. There is a convention that seeks to have the media protect young criminals who have not attained the age of majority, but such a convention is often dictated by the nature of the crime. We could appreciate the non-revelation of the names and identity of young people in such misdemeanours as petty larceny, but the same convention would not apply to drug trafficking and murder. Those are adult crimes and the perpetrators should be treated as adults.
Unless the drug courier is a moron, there can be no excuse for seeking to excuse the trafficker. By trying to do so would only lead to the recruiting of even more young people, and because of the economic situation, there seems to be no shortage of young people willing to risk all to move cocaine across borders. And these young people appear to have qualified for visas to the metropolitan countries.
In fact, the conditions are such that those who deal in drugs appear as role models for young people who have been pounding the streets in search of non-existent jobs.
The pay is obviously good; it is reported that a courier is offered at least US$2,000 to transport a kilogram of cocaine to the United States.
Certainly that is lure enough for a young person, but at the same time the critics should not conclude that these young people are so innocent that they deserve protection from the wider society. They know what they are about. They have opted to take a chance in a dangerous situation that some see as a game.

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