Drugs interdiction
Editorial
On Thursday, a Greek-registered ship, the MV Husum, was released by the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU) after a two-day search for drugs had turned up nothing. CANU officials told Stabroek News that a thorough search of the vessel would have taken about a month, because first the 200 odd containers on board would have had to have been off-loaded. In addition, a systematic combing of the Husum's interior and the area beneath the cargo hold would have been especially tedious because the drug interdiction agency did not possess the equipment to facilitate a search of that kind. In the case of the MV Danielsen, which produced a spectacular drugs haul last year for anti-narcotics agents, sophisticated equipment was made available through the direct involvement of the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the US Coast Guard. CANU initially had searched that vessel too and had found nothing. Knowledgeable sources told the Sunday Stabroek recently that firstly, Guyana had become a major drugs trans-shipment point, and secondly, that a significant proportion of the narcotics passing through this country en route to Europe and North America was transported by sea. One source was reported as saying that in the last seven to eight years there had been a 300 per cent increase in the number of vessels docking in Guyana on their way to Europe, North America and the Caribbean. With that kind of volume in shipping traffic, there is no way that Guyanese officials, with their limited capabilities, could monitor it adequately. It is not even as if the authorities could claim that the drug traffic here is someone else's problem; the local drug barons who are the intermediaries in this trade are partly paid in cocaine - and now, it seems, in heroin as well - and they in turn remunerate their mules in kind rather than cash. In order to convert their earnings into dollars, therefore, they sell these drugs in the local market, for which the nation is paying heavily in social and economic terms. The US State Department International Narcotics Report released recently, which claimed that crack and heroin were rare here, was widely off the mark, a fact to which the local authorities can certainly attest. While it is true, as the US report stated, that one of the things hampering anti-narcotics efforts was the lack of co-ordination between the agencies holding responsibility for drug interdiction, a more fundamental problem relates to a lack of money and resources, both human and technical. Clearly, with our open borders and poorly regulated ports of entry, we are in need of external assistance if we are to make any dent in the quantity of drugs passing through our territorial sphere. Monitoring shipping satisfactorialy, at least, will require far more sophisticated equipment than CANU or the police currently have at their disposal, as well as better trained officers, technically speaking. It may also necessitate more frequent joint operations with outside agencies such as the DEA. Combatting drugs is both a complex problem, and an expensive one. However, it is not as if no work has been done on the problem at all, and the new Minister of Home Affairs has not taken up his post in a total policy vacuum where drugs are concerned. There is an extant drugs master plan, for instance, although little is heard about it. Since Minister Gajraj is not responsible for CANU, however, he is operating at a disadvantage, and there clearly needs to be very much closer co-ordination between his Ministry and the Ministry of Finance if any successful measures to interdict narcotics are to be instituted. In the end what one would like to see is some vigour and imagination in implementing what policies do exist, and a display of doggedness in pursuing outside assistance for equipment and training for local drug enforcement agencies. This is a very fragile, very small society, and it is in real danger of being undermined by the international drugs trade. According to Brazil's TV Globo, reported on Suriname radio yesterday, our eastern neighbour now has drug laboratories. Even if the report turns out to be inaccurate, it is true that Suriname has progessed further along the narcotics trafficking road than we have, and that it is just a matter of time before we catch up. We should take their experience as a warning. 
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