Ghanaians and danger of drug menace

Pages 23 & 30: Daily Graphic, March 23, 2009.
Article: Albert K. Salia

"Concern about a potential failed state - not Pakistan, not Somalia, but California's neighbor Mexico - is mounting in Washington as an all-out war involving 45,000 Mexican military personnel fails to quell rising drug violence that is spilling from such Mexican cities as Tijuana into the United States. An estimated 6,290 drug-related murders occurred in Mexico last year, six times the standard definition of a civil war, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a leading scholar on the issue at the Brookings Institution " - San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, March 12, 2009.

The impact of drugs on our society are numerous and one can hardly find anybody who is a drug-addict and is loved by society. Drug dealing has become a multi-billion dollar business world-wide, permeating and affecting our lives in covert and overt ways. Drug dealing is no longer a violation of the law neither is it just a social problem. It has manifested in increased organised and syndicated criminality, political and economic subversion that threatens vital democratic institutions and in fact, the nation’s security.
The negative consequences of drug abuse affect not only individuals who abuse drugs but also their families and friends, various businesses, and government resources.

Social consequences

The most obvious effects of drug abuse — which are manifested in the individuals who abuse drugs — include illhealth, sickness and ultimately, death.
Children of individuals who abuse drugs often are abused or neglected as a result of the individuals' preoccupation with drugs. Children whose parents and other family members abuse drugs often are physically or emotionally abused and often lack proper immunisations, medical care, dental care, and necessities such as food, water, and shelter.
The fragmentation of many families for example, is due to the wedge represented by substance abuse; many studies have found that family disintegration correlates more strongly with drug abuse than with poverty. Of course, the relationship is two-way; a study on Thailand, for example, has found that increasing use of heroin and psychotropic substances is due in part to the breakdown of traditional family structures and values. In any case, there is a negative link between drugs and the family.
The Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, notes that, "drugs are also poisoning the region’s (West Africa) youth since the foot soldiers in this growing trade are paid for their services with cocaine. As a result, the vulnerability of West Africa to drugs and crime is deepening even further".
A consultant psychiatrist and a member of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), Dr J. B. Asare, also notes that, “the use of drugs in Ghana is mainly an activity of the youth. About 80 per cent of drug related admissions to the Accra Psychiatric Hospital are between the ages of 16 and 29 years. As more youth become addicted, our investment in our children and the human resource base of our country is being threatened”.
The correlation between drug use and prostitution, while too often portrayed as due to an underlying moral deficiency, is more likely due to a decision to finance the former activity by way of the latter. Indeed, at the heart of the matter is not some inherent criminal deviance which brings together the realms of drugs and crime, but the ability of drugs to act as a lucrative wholesale and retail commodity for which legitimate entrepreneurs will not complete.
The negative impact of drug abuse on health is scientifically well-established and documented. The health costs of a drug addict appear to be some 80 percent higher than those of an average citizen in the same age group. Substances commonly associated with drug-related deaths are cocaine, heroin and other opiates, barbiturates and amphetamines. Substances such as benzodiazepines, hallucinogens and cannabis can have a negative impact on health but are not usually associated with death. The link between injecting drug use (IDU) and the spread of HIV/AIDS is also well recognised; today, at the global level, some 22 per cent of the world's HIV/AIDS population injects drugs. The worldwide HIV-prevalence rate for injecting drug users is between 40-50 per cent.

Crime and criminality

Drug-related crime occurs primarily in the form of trafficking-related criminal activity, including violence between groups in competition for increased market share at the wholesale and retail levels. The current unrest in Mexico, which has claimed millions of lives is a test case.
In his piece; "Drugs, Violence and Economics", David Friedman contends that the link between drugs and violent crime could occur in three ways: violent crime by consumers of drugs, violent crime associated with the production and distribution of drugs, or violent crime directly associated with the attempt to enforce drug prohibition.
For the case of crime by drug consumers, two mechanisms are commonly asserted, with opposite implications. One is drugs as an input to violent crime–people committing crimes under the influence of drugs that they otherwise would not commit.
Violent crime by people involved in the distribution network for drugs might also come about by a variety of mechanisms. One possibility, is that violence occurs because people in that industry have wealth in highly portable forms — drugs and cash — which make them obvious targets for theft or robbery, and since calling the police is not a practical option they must use private violence instead to protect themselves.
A second, suggested by Jeffrey Miron, is that violence occurs as a form of dispute resolution among people who cannot use legal channels because their disputes are occurring in an illegal industry
A third, and rather different possibility is that violent crime represents rent seeking in the competition among suppliers. Suppose, as much anecdotal evidence suggests, that drug distribution often occurs through local monopoly providers. Their profits depend in part on the area they control. So we would expect competition between adjacent firms for territory. One form such competition might take would be violence by agents of one firm against agents, or possibly customers, of another.
Besides, there are crimes such as armed robberies, rape and other violent ones that leave in their wake not only the physical damage inflicted but traumatic scars that haunt the victims for a long time.
The Executive Director of the UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa, warns that the drug problem in West Africa, "is growing exponentially and threatening to turn the region into an epicentre of lawlessness and instability. This is the last thing West Africa needs".
If any decent minded person would want to discount Mr Costa’s warning, then the recent execution of Guinea Bissau’s Army Chief, General Batista Tagme na Waie, should send a signal that the country better sits up or face the consequences. That is because it had been proven that the execution of Gen Waie pointed to outside influences, "specifically the Latin American drug cartels who are using Guinea Bissau as a transit point to ship cocaine to Europe".
According to Dr David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, South Africa, "This recent set of killings can be explained [as] the action of the drug traffickers, who would not allow anything to get in the way or to obstruct their links with Europe,"

Economic Consequences

The economic impact of drug abuse on businesses whose employees abuse drugs can be significant. While many drug abusers are unable to attain or hold full-time employment, those who do work put others at risk, particularly when employed in positions where even a minor degree of impairment could be catastrophic; airline pilots, air traffic controllers, train operators, and bus drivers are just a few examples. Economically, businesses often are affected because employees who abuse drugs sometimes steal cash or supplies, equipment, and products that can be sold to get money to buy drugs. Moreover, absenteeism, lost productivity and increased use of medical and insurance benefits by employees who abuse drugs affect a business financially.
It is important to appreciate that other crimes whose effect might not be physical but subtle are the economic and commercial crimes associated with drugs. Counterfeiting, currency trafficking, smuggling, tax evasion, bribery, corruption, money laundering are examples of such drug-related crimes which hit weak national economies of states where drug trafficking thrives. It must be understood that these are corrosive crimes since they undermine the nation, thereby, directly or indirectly generating negative forces that can create political, economic and social tensions. They are crimes that kill slowly but surely.
As K. B. Quantson puts it, "weak economies, with weak weightless currencies, over-liberalised economic policies, in an environment of inordinate, even irrational dependence on foreign consumer items, some of them more exotic than our circumstances dictate, are particularly attractive to drug-dealing because of the ready foreign exchange that they provide".
Certainly, we need not forget the impact on our criminal justice system and the various state institutions that no more function as required because the drug cartels have taken hold of them.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), many assume that the illicit drug trade is a source of employment without any costs for those unable to find productive work in other sectors. This assumption is not entirely accurate. It may be the case that in Bolivia, a 10 per cent increase in coca and cocaine production raises GNP by two per cent and reduces unemployment by six per cent. But inevitably the employment gains generated by the drug trade are more than offset by various side effects.
Two such effects include the inevitable spillover from drug production into consumption, which impacts negatively on productivity, and the sacrifice of resources diverted from legitimate and more sustainable investments. Identifiable costs of drug abuse in consumer countries range from 0.5 to 1.3 per cent of GDP, the largest part of which is used for drug-related crime and law enforcement costs. Taking those costs into account, the argument that the illicit drug industry can act as an engine of growth becomes rather difficult to defend.
According to a report by the UNODC, "drug money is perverting the weak economies in the region. In some cases, the value of the drugs being trafficked is greater than the country’s national income. … These states are not collapsing. They risk becoming shell-states: sovereign in name, but hollowed out from inside by criminals in collusion with corrupt officials in the government and the security services. This not only jeopardises their survival, it poses a serious threat to regional security because of the transnational nature of the crimes.
The increasingly-felt presence of crime syndicates throughout the world is but one reflection of a trend in which criminals are using their earnings to invest in real assets. Criminal entrepreneurship in any economy introduces a parasitic, anti-competitive approach to doing business, as intimidation, violence and extortion rather than free-market competition serve as the primary determinants of resource allocation.
While knowledge of these consequences is still relatively rudimentary, the illicit drug problem has begun to ascend the world's social and economic agenda, thereby considerably raising the prospects that the obstacles which have, until today limited a more detailed understanding, will be overcome.