Drug abuse: More still needs to be done

The continuing police campaign against illegal drugs is putting pressure on suppliers and users, but there is a very long way to go before it makes much more than a minor dent in the trade and it will need to be backed up with action to cut demand, as well as cut off supply.

With 1 655 arrests made by Thursday, the total must now be in the vicinity of 2 000, and yet that is certainly a tiny fraction of those involved in the drugs trade and a tiny dip in the number abusing drugs. So, we have a long way to go.

In some ways, the initial 10 or so days have been a bit like fishing in a new dam where no one has ever fished before. You can drop in a net and be guaranteed that when you pull it out there will be a lot of fish, mostly small, but with the odd large one. There has been so little enforcement of our fairly comprehensive block of law criminalising drug possession, drug sales and drug use that almost any raid will net something.

There have been attempts before to go further, and these have been less effective than they might have been. A few years ago, a serious set of raids in Mbare brought some results, but there were suspicions that the bigger dealers might have been tipped off and so kept clear. In any case, it appeared to be a once-off event, denting some of the trade but it very quickly recovered as dealers and users returned to the streets once they thought the coast was clear.

This is why this time it must involve continuous action, every day. Of course, the police have a lot of other work on their plate, from tracking down robbers and thieves all the way to dealing with domestic violence and the drunk and disorderly louts late at night.

But it should be possible to assign a small percentage of the available duty officers each day to anti-drug work, and do this every day, for weeks and months on end to keep up the pressure. 

It will also require some careful analysis and intelligence gathering, detective work, to build up the picture of the distribution channels, and try and get ever closer to the main supply sources and break up the value chains.

One problem is that there is unlikely, for many of the illegal drugs, although not all, to be a single “Mr Big” or even a small mafia type gang. A lot of drug supply is decentralised.

In the case of one common drug, marijuana, there are small-time producers with a couple of plants. There is also more intensive farming, as was found last week in Lupane, where police busted a farming operation of 246 plants and arrested seven people.

But there are almost certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of small producers who may be independents with a few score customers.

Although once you find a farm of several hundred plants, there must be a fairly sophisticated, by Zimbabwean standards at least, distribution network to get that much into the hands of a much larger number of smokers. 

Even the other common drugs, crystal meth or those banned addictive cough syrups, there may be fewer suppliers, but again there is unlikely to be a single entry point or single smuggler gang. Few doubt that the majority of these  drugs are smuggled in from South Africa, and here again, the police promising action against truck and bus drivers appears the most useful approach, along with operations along the Limpopo against all smugglers, in both directions.

As we move up the scale into more dangerous drugs, cocaine and heroin, for example, the number of original sources diminishes. There have been some major busts of cocaine smugglers, although it is quite possible that at least some of this traffic is using Zimbabwe as a way station on the way to the larger South African market. But these drugs are available in Zimbabwe, thanks to the growing availability of foreign currency. 

So, we need to build up our intelligence gathering for local dealers and users, and that means the police being able to penetrate suburbs and social groups where they rarely socially mix.

Even in the present operation, when there is something like the Lupane bust, or catching someone with a 60kg haul in Masvingo, then obviously there is a need for detective work to move down the distribution chain, and to win the big prize of finding the main organiser of the operation. The courts have shown willingness to deal a lot more harshly with the larger producers and organisers of the drug trade than with the end user smoking a hand-rolled cigarette or popping a tablet.

At the beginning of the present operation, the police made it clear that they would pick up users they found, but were far keener on those users telling them where they bought the drugs from than on clogging the courts with hundreds or thousands of young people who almost certainly needed counselling, as well as a bit of deterrent action.

At this customer level, there should be some records kept, so repeat offenders can be dealt with a bit harder and pushed more firmly into the arms of those who specialise in treating addicts.

We should not underestimate deterrent action. There have been a lot of comments over the expulsion of eight sixth formers from Harare Dominican Convent caught abusing drugs while on an official school camp. But the girls at that school have been warned that this action is not tolerated, and parents who send their daughters to a church-run school usually expect, or at least hope, that their children are totally safe while in class or during school events.

Most employers whip out their disciplinary code when they find staff drinking or taking illicit drugs on the premises, or when they suspect a member of staff has come to work blind drunk or high as a kite. Some things you simply do not need, like giving a person under the influence of anything access to a database or operating complex and potentially dangerous machinery.

Tolerance is generally a virtue, but our tolerance to public drunkenness, public drug abuse and public drug dealing has become more of an anarchy licence, and this now threatens to derail our society. This is why we need to help the police, at the very least help them identify the dealers, so that supplies can be reduced sharply. 

But we must be prepared for the long haul. A few thousand arrests will dent the trade but continual pressure for months, perhaps forever, will eventually tame the trade.