Getting a handle on illicit drugs will reduce other crimes—says Ramjattan

Apr 05, 2018 News

The opening of the seminar yesterday. From L-R: Khemraj Ramjattan, Minister Public Security; Terry Steers-Gonzalez, Charge d’ Affairs, U.S. Embassy; Jean-Ricot Dormeus, OAS representative to Guyana; and Beverly Reynolds, CARICOM’s Coordinator for Health and Human Development.

Guyana has joined representatives from regional drug observatories at a two-day regional seminar which opened yesterday at the Ramada Georgetown Princess Hotel. The event is geared towards strengthening the capacity to fight illicit drug.
Delivering the feature address, Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan, provided a very bleak overview of the ‘nuclear’ impact illicit drugs have on the economic, political and social sectors in the Caribbean and Latin America.
“We must have a handle on how we deal with drugs so that a reduction in the amounts that we have in and around the region will certainly ensure that there are reductions in other crimes,” Ramjattan stated.
The Minister said that illicit drugs have been the platform for money laundering, an escalation of trafficking in persons, increased robberies, gun runnings and more murders in the region.
Guyana like most Caribbean countries is considered a hub for the illicit drug trade, which is transshipped to the United States and Europe.
Illegal airstrips in the hinterland have been used to receive drugs, which then filter into other parts of the country to be shipped out via several products that include rice, lumber and a variety of processed foods.
Representatives from 13 observatories are attending the seminar, which will help to strengthen the capacity of representatives to gather, analyze and report on drug-related information and to enable the development of evidence-based drug policies and programmes.
Terry Steers-Gonzalez, Charge d’ Affairs of the United States Embassy, noted that without data, the efforts are a shot in the dark.
“Hope is not a strategy. With better data collection, analysis, and reporting countries can properly focus the efforts of relevant authorities in the needed areas, support budget requests for personnel and programming, and develop appropriate legislation, policies and programs to combat drug use and trafficking with the goal of making our countries safer for our citizens,” Steers-Gonzalez pointed out.
He stated that the United States Government will continue to support drug observatories, but that those future efforts will address the use and flow of opioids through the hemisphere.
While addressing the opioids epidemic is more a U.S. problem and a key goal of president Donald Trump, Steers-Gonzalez noted that the use of associated substances are a potential threat to the Caribbean as well.

STARTLING STATS

Ramjattan quoted statistics from the Foreign Affairs which published an investigated piece entitled, ‘Latin America’s Murder Epidemic – How to Stop the Killing’. The Minister noted that illicit drugs are contributing significantly to the murders.
It was noted that Latin America’s homicide rate is exceedingly high at a time when murder is declining virtually everywhere else. The region is home to just eight percent of the global population, but 33 percent of its murders.
If conditions remain unchanged, the regional homicide rate is expected to rise from 21.5 per 100,000 today to around 35 per 100,000 by 2030.
Statistics from the publication point out that even the world’s hardest-hit war zones can hardly compete. Between 2001 and 2014, roughly 26,000 civilians died because of the fighting in Afghanistan. Over that same period, 67,000 Hondurans were murdered. Honduras has one-third the population of Afghanistan.
In the case of Brazil, in 2015 they reported roughly as many homicides as the combined deaths from conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria that same year.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat has collaborated with the Inter American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) to host the seminar, which is part of the response under the Drug Demand Reduction (DDR) component of the Tenth European Development Fund (EDF) Crime and Security Programme between the European Union and CARIFORUM.
Also addressing the opening of the seminar were Beverly Reynolds, CARICOM’s Coordinator for Health and Human Development and Jean-Ricot Dormeus, the Organisation of American States (OAS) representative to Guyana.

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