A GUY'S VIEW - Treat the cause of the disease
A few years ago, a natural healer by the name of Dr. Sebi came to Barbados. Hundreds of persons clamoured to learn from him.
He taught that the source of all disease is mucus. Remove the mucus and you remove the disease. A major part of his philosophy was grounded in treating disease at its source. Cellular cleansing was the guarantee to good health, he taught.
A little earlier, Stetson “Red Plastic Bag” Wiltshire sang a song in which he paralleled the country to the human body. That song said that the country was sick. As the evidence, he said, see it as the body and then you can tell. He then proceeded to depict what the various parts of the body represented in the country. Maybe, the cure for our national illness could be explained by means of the human body as well.
Gun violence is now the country’s main sickness. Some people have been wondering how this could be cured. Others have decided to live with it, believing that it is an incurable cancer. This may be true of persons who live in the areas in which these events take place. Maybe, it is a question of perspective.
There are very few places where out of control violence has been pulled back. One was New York. Many persons have acknowledged New York’s turnaround, but there has not been a great deal of attention paid to how it was accomplished.
The New York strategy involved strong policing, especially the targeting of the smallest crimes that we might categorise as little more than indiscipline. This sent the message that no crime would go unpunished. However, the solution was not limited to policing. Red light districts were cleaned up and the slide into debauchery halted. The correction strategy targeted the root of the problem.
We are told that guns are associated with illegal drugs. If this is true, then the strategy to curb gun violence should include addressing illegal drugs.
Following the lead of the Americans, a number of countries have declared war on drugs. Those wars are still being fought, all of them without success. Could it be that wars only cause carnage without solving anything?
The power of the trade in illegal drugs is due to the addictive nature of the drugs. Once a client is hooked, it takes a miracle to escape. Drug dealers, therefore, have clients, and money, for life.
The American war on drugs placed so many young black men in prison that the building and management of prisons became a business for private sector individuals. Of course, business is about making money, not solving people’s problems. In the prison industry, there must be a constant supply of prisoners for business to be successful. In a capitalist enterprise, collaboration between the state and business required that you lock up more people without solving the problem that placed them in prison in the first place. Empty jails are bad for business.
When one investigates the remedies for drug addiction, imprisonment does not appear as one of the cures. Confinement in a treatment facility may assist with drying out an addict, provided that it is accompanied by other treatment options, but it is not a cure.
There are different approaches to dealing with drug addiction but the general steps include detoxification (the process by which the body rids itself of a drug), behavioural counselling, medication (depending on the drug), evaluation and treatment for co-occurring mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, and long-term follow-up to
prevent relapse.
These inputs suggest that drug addiction is treated as a disease rather than a crime. Maybe we should give consideration to treating this country’s drug situation more like a health issue and less like a crime.
If there is one fact which is incontrovertible, it is that the war on drugs has not worked. For many years illegal drugs have been freely available in Barbados, with fewer and fewer dry periods. Notwithstanding all the efforts of the police, there is no person in Barbados who wants illegal drugs and cannot have whatever they desire. Someone defined madness as doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different result.
Persons involved in illegal business, of necessity, need certain tools to protect their enterprise. It is, therefore, not surprising that guns and drugs are associated. Tackling the
illegal drugs business should have an impact on its attendant attachments, like guns, hence, the anti-gun fight should take the role of illegal drugs into account.
The point has been made that any move to legalise marijuana should be accompanied by evidence of its usefulness or that it is not harmful. This is a most responsible
approach as it seeks to continue to protect the wider population from exposure to what may be a harmful substance.
The other point of view is that alcohol is no more useful than marijuana and may be as harmful. The jury is out on that, since the advocates for legalisation of marijuana who make this point are not necessarily disinterested, objective observers.
But we are prepared to give people the option of making a decision for themselves where alcohol is concerned. The fact that an item may be lawfully accessed does not compel its use. If marijuana is removed from the list of illegal items it will not become the drug of choice for persons who do not use it now. Health conscious persons will not suddenly decide that smoking will no longer damage their lungs because using marijuana is no longer a crime.
Education may be more successful in combating illegal drug use than laws. Persons are more likely to refrain from an activity if they understand why they should, than if they are simply told to do so. How many of us disobeyed our parents when they cautioned us against some activity, but now, a little wiser, adhere to the very principles we stubbornly resisted?
The strain on several parts of our judicial system would be relieved if marijuana were not a prohibited substance, but the longer we wait to change this the more likely it is that we will lose that benefit. Some experts tell us that marijuana is a gateway drug. This may be true, for we see persons who started out on this drug go on to more destructive drugs like cocaine and its derivatives. When a too significant number of our people have moved on to the likes of crack, removing marijuana from the illegal
drug list will have little benefit.
When, not if, marijuana is no longer illegal, there will still be the need to address other dangerous substances. Will guns still be needed to survive in those business activities? By not treating our disease of gun violence at the level of the cause, are we entrenching this lifestyle in our communities?