That AFC proposal to amend the Narcotics Act

May 27, 2018 Features / Columnists, Letters

Dear Editor,
In a discussion in Kaieteur News edition of 26 May about the AFC’s intention to table a private member’s bill to amend the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Act, there is this statement: “Despite the AFC’s position on the issue, the Government’s official position is that the law is the law”.
The first time that I saw this statement made by a Minister of the Government, I was perplexed. What on earth did that mean? That the law is the law and cannot be changed? Therefore, I searched for just what the Minister had said. What I found was that the statement had been made in relation to the sentence handed down by the Magistrate in a case of possession of a relatively small quantity of marijuana. What he was saying, as I understood it, was that if a law specifies a specific punishment, then the magistrate has to follow that law.
In other words, she/he cannot change the law and vary the punishment. I saw a subsequent opinion that the magistrate can indeed take into account the special circumstances of an individual case.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I at present have access to either the Narcotics Act or whatever rules apply to magistrates’ sentencing powers, so I cannot say which opinion is correct.
However, this article of 26 May was not discussing the powers of magistrates to vary sentences. It was about a possible Parliamentary amendment, by means of a private member’s bill, to the Act under which the individual was imprisoned.
MPs can introduce private members’ bills. Nobody in the Government, as far as I am aware, has said that they cannot. So how do we get to the assumption that “the Government’s official position is that the law is the law”, when the subject of the article is the AFC’s intention to seek to amend the relevant legislation?
About which I have seen no opinion expressed by any Minister of the Government. Yes, there were amendments tabled in 2015 about which nothing has been done so far. But that is par for the course. That is, no doubt, why the AFC has resorted to a private member’s bill. Whether that bill will be handled more efficiently than the 2015 proposed amendments, we shall have to wait and see.
Pat Robinson Commissiong

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