Public Agenda (Accra)
Daniel Akwasi Amankwaah
18 July 2008
opinion
Drug abuse is one of the serious threats of our day. In 1987, Dr. Javier Peres De Cuellar, former U.N. Secretary General warned: "Drug abuse is a time bomb ticking away in the heart of civilization we must now find measures to deal with it before it explodes and destroy us."
Is this "prophesy" being fulfilled? Is Ghana safe? Is the Narcotics Control Board capable of protecting the nation from the scourge of drugs? How are drug abuse and illicit drug trafficking being controlled in Ghana? These are some of the issues raised in this write-up.
"Drugs" may refer to many substances but for the purposes of this article, the focus is on marijuana, heroin, cocaine and psychotropic substances including alcohol. Note also that in this article "he" stands for "she".
How drugs work in the body
Drugs are smoked, injected, sniffed or drunk. Whatever the means of administration, there is one result. Drugs enter the bloodstream and then the troubles begin. I want to use Marijuana to illustrate how this happens.
Marijuana has about 101 nicknames: abonsam tawa, tampe, ganja, wee, yen, grass, cool, weed of wisdom, weed, pot, grass cannabis, hash, hashish, Indian hemp etc. There are about 400 chemicals in the marijuana plant. The active ingredient in the plant is called delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinnol (Delta-9).
Marijuana is mostly smoked. The chemicals are in the smoke. The smoke first goes to the lungs. Through absorption, the delta-9 enters the blood stream. In the body there are receptors. The receptors for delta-9 are mostly found in the brain, the spinal cord and around the reproductive organs. These delta-9 receptors, as their names go, receives the delta-9 which has been absorbed into the blood.
This means that the delta-9 will be collected in the brain, the spinal cord and around the reproductive organs. The drugs will stay in the body for about 30 days. This is the beginning of troubles.
The spinal cord and the brain constitute the central nervous system (CNS). The CNS controls feeling, emotion, judgment, inhibition etc. Depending on certain other factors, a person on marijuana may therefore behave in many unusual ways.
Some may be excited others may be depressed. If he is a driver, he may decide to overtake in a curve, or use the shoulder of the road while all other decent drivers are in a queue. He may speed even though there is a narrow bridge ahead and plunge his bus into a river killing innocent people. He may even decide not to stop when the traffic light is red. All these happen because his judgment is impaired.
He may have high sexual appetite and at the same time very low inhibitions and therefore will not consider raping a three year old person. He may hear voices and see images that are not real. There are many things that can happen to a person who smokes marijuana but if these are all the problems associated with marijuana there will not be much cause for alarm.
As the person smokes, his body becomes used to the drugs. Very soon he cannot stop. He is addicted to the drugs. He becomes a slave to the drugs. Further, if he started with one roll or joint, as the users call it, that one roll will not be enough for him so he has to graduate from one roll to two and from two to three till he smokes several rolls or joints a day. As he continues, he becomes physically addicted. This means that when he stops smoking marijuana he becomes sick. This is actual slavery but is it just slavery?
If the person is using other drugs like cocaine and heroin, the person goes through similar process of the drug entering the bloodstream, the effects on the central nervous system and addiction. However, with cocaine and heroin the intensity of these processes, especially addiction, is far greater than that of marijuana.
Addiction: a horrendous factor
Addiction to drugs is one of the horrendous things that can happen to anybody. It is the main source of the crimes associated with drugs. Drugs like cocaine and heroin are very addictive and at the same time expensive. When a person is addicted to drugs he cannot stop so if he needs the drugs he has to find money.
Stealing and armed robbery
He may start by stealing from the house but very soon "small" moneys cannot buy the drugs he needs. He needs big and quick money. He has to do what will bring big and quick money. He may join armed robbery groups. Before they go on "operations" to get money to sustain their drug use the armed robbers will have to take away human instincts or mercy from their hearts so that when they are killing they will not have any feelings at all. How are they going to do that?
They will take some of the drugs. The drugs will affect their CNS and change the inhibitions associated with normal human beings. This will enable them rob and even kill their own parents just to use the money for more drugs and the cycle goes on and on.
If the person who is addicted has access to state funds it is quite simple, he dips his hands and spent it on drugs. In fact an addicted person will do anything to get drugs regardless of the consequences. This is why there is money in drug trafficking.
Money in drug trafficking
Consider a commodity that a user has no option but has to do all that he can to get money to buy. What happens to the one who sells it? So if I want to get all your money all I need to do to you is to introduce you to drugs. Once you start using the drugs and you become addicted you will use all your money to buy. This means I will get all your money. So while you are being destroyed by the drugs I get money. The more I get people to use the drugs the more I get money. No wonder the turnover for drug dealing is about 500 billion dollars, almost the same as that of the oil trade.
But death and destruction
There is huge money in drugs so people will do all that they can to traffic in it. Some hide the drugs in shoes, artifacts, body cavities and any conceivable method in other to avoid arrest. The most dangerous but frequent method of concealment is swallowing. Many people die before they reach their destination with the "cargo" in their stomach. Death happens few hours when some of the drug pellets burst in the stomach.
The narcotics control board
No matter the consequences, we have people who are determined to traffic in drugs. There are others who may start using drugs if they are not sensitized about the dangers of drug abuse. As for those who are already addicted to the drugs, only treatment and rehabilitation can save some of them. This is the reason why the Narcotics Control Board was established in 1991.
Achievements but the warning
Since its establishment the Board has achieved much. Many kilos of drugs which would have ended up on the street has been seized and destroyed. Many drug dealers have been arrested and jailed. Despite its envious achievements the Narcotics Control Board faces a particular challenge which threatens to erode all that has been built or achieved. Indeed I can warn that if nothing is done drug control in Ghana will collapse and the consequences will be unimaginable.
Nacob staff are paid half of garbage collector's pay
Since its establishment in 1991, the Narcotics Control Board workers have been receiving the lowest pay in Ghana.
The table below shows the current basic salaries and allowances taken by narcotics control officers.
A gist of the work of a narcotics officer
One of the major functions of a Narcotic officer is to arrest drug dealers. To do this, the officer must be able to detect who and who is a drug dealer. This is one of the difficult tasks. The drug dealers are people with big money so they do all that they can to conceal their activities.
The officer must trace a particular suspect for days months and even years. This underground study must be done in such a way that the drug dealer will not know that the officer is tracing or investigating him. If the drug dealer gets to know the officer is finished.
The drug dealers also have their detectives to ensure that their activities are kept secret. This demands a high level of professional detective abilities and long years of training concerning how drug dealers behave and other things I cannot disclose here.
At the entry points like the airport, the officer has another gigantic task to know who is carrying drugs and who is not carrying drugs. I cannot disclose the techniques here but you need trained skills like a sniffing dog to do that effectively. Most of the couriers swallow drugs so how are you to know that this person has drugs in his belly? This is the task of the Narcotics Officer.
When the person is arrested there is another gigantic task faced by the narcotics officer. The officer must make sure the drug dealers will not get to know the arresting officer or the officer runs the risk of incurring the wrath of the other drug dealers. You can imagine the threats and the dangers from these ruthless people.
Now, if the person arrested is a swallower, the officer faces another unhealthy task. This time he has to police the person to expel the drugs. The officer should stand close to the person when the person is expelling the drugs. This is one of the disgusting tasks the officer faces. The drugs will be expelled together with the feaces or what we normally called the toilet. The officer has nothing to cover the nose and he has to smell the scent of the drug courier's toilet as long as the person has not finished expelling.
Some experienced drug swallowers swallow as many as 120 pellets and they use hours or days to expel. The officer must police the person very closely to ensure that all the pellets are expelled. If the swallower dies in the course of expelling (they often do die), the officer will have to witness this gruesome spectacle and find a way of getting the corpse to a surgeon for an operation to remove the remaining pellets in the stomach.
The other tasks the officer must perform are many. Sometimes he has to chase drug dealers, conduct raids and undergo long hours of surveillance sometimes under very dangerous situations.
The drug dealers work at odd hours so the officer has no specific time of work. He works anytime, any day under any conditions depending on how the drug dealers work.
In fact the work of the officer cannot be fully described. The officer must be somebody who knows his work and has been trained to do that.
Ghana is grateful to countries like U.S, Britain, Germany and Israel who have run some training programmes for narcotics officers. Besides the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes has offered a number of trainings for Narcotics Officers.
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