Efforts on to finalise Anti-Drug Plan budget

Barbados now has a National Anti-Drug Plan, but the cost of executing that five-year initiative has not yet been finalised.

 

However, Manager of the National Council on Substance Abuse (NCSA), Betty Hunte, says that they are working on getting those figures firmed up so that they can be included in upcoming Estimates. In the meantime, she revealed that the NCSA, as the only Government agency set up for drug prevention, will be providing support to other agencies as they roll out the Plan in this the initial year, to assist with any drug-related programmes those agencies wish to pursue.

 

She made the disclosure while speaking to the media yesterday on the strategy which is to run from 2017-2021, and which she said seeks to address all areas of drug control and prevention in this country.

 

“At this point in time, there is no one agency which has been given money for the actual Plan and that has been the problem. Three years ago when we started and we tried to look through all of the budget documents for all of the ministries’ agencies, it was difficult to actually pull out or disaggregate what activities were drug related and what was just coming out of a mandate of an organisation. We also found that a lot of agencies were doing stuff not directly related to the mandate,” she said.

 

Hunte added, “If we could have that costed, it would not only help the agencies themselves, but overall Government would have a better idea of what is being spent on the drug response in Barbados.”

 

As such, she said the NCSA is trying to get the Ministry of Finance to include in the Government’s budget, an item called National Anti-Drug Plan, so that going forward each agency would have that item built into their individual budgets. She said it would also make it easier to measure the spend and the type of activities which persons identify as part of the agency response to drug abuse. Hunte’s comments came as she said that they have not even come up with a rough figure for the execution of the Plan.

 

“People categorise different activities differently. For instance, we know the NCSA is in prevention, all of our activities are in prevention; however, we have just hired a counsellor, that is treatment, so we are now spanning two areas… Agencies like the Royal Barbados Police Force, they cover a whole set of areas. They do prevention through their DARE programme; they’re set up for supply control, that is their mandate; they’re offering support for families in their family programme, that can be considered treatment. So we really have to sit down with each agency,” she stated. (JRT)