Online Reporter
ZIMBABWE is increasing the effectiveness of its war on drugs, the interdiction of supplies and far less patience with those who claim after arrest to be just victims or worthy of a second chance. We are still open to treating addiction as a medical condition, but with the addicts presenting themselves before they fall foul of the police.
The multi-sectoral National Committee of Drug and Substance Abuse has now imported test kits which this week are being moved to clinics, hospitals and police posts.
Initially at least the kits will be used to confirm drug use by the volunteers coming forward and seeking help in rehabilitation.
This will also include those sent to clinics and hospitals by communities and religious leaders, to start the process of getting themselves fixed up.
Even entering treatment voluntarily cannot be considered a soft option and those following this path need to understand that they have to make a considerable effort and may well be on some sort of outpatient care for many years.
While initial use of the kits does not yet seem to include involuntary testing, this must come under roughly the same sort of rules that guide traffic police in using breathalysers on suspicious drivers before more formal tests are done at a hospital to provide court-level proof.
A lot of people who should volunteer are not going to do so, and we cannot have people under the influence of dangerous drugs driving or operating machinery.
A major recent change in the war on drugs, however, comes as a result of decisions to get a lot tougher. Police and other law enforcement are being equipped to interdict supplies, preventing smuggling and preventing the home grown mbanje reaching markets.
They cannot be 100 percent effective so long as criminals can make money from drugs, but ever stronger efforts will mean that criminals have to take more risks, so are more likely to be caught, and will pay steeper prices, basically longer terms in jail.
Generally society has always been moderately tough in its attitude to suppliers, although there was perhaps in the past some degree of a lack of urgency over soft drugs such as mbanje.
But those days are now over and it would be very difficult for a court to justify a non-custodial sentence for suppliers. Special circumstances can always exist, but a dealer getting away with even a steep fine or community service is unlikely to be accepted by the public any longer.
Zimbabwe was a lot more lenient on users, but that has not proved to be very effective. A fair percentage of users fund at least part of their addiction by acting as advertisers and sub-dealers for their dealer, and so are also on the supply side, and there are always dealers who only move around with very small quantities so they can claim plausibly to be just a user on arrest.
There will be other examples of misplaced leniency.
Until recently pure users with just a few grammes of mbanje or something similar were given the option of an admission of guilt fine at a police station. This was not effective.
As we have noticed for some time, one problem with the admission of guilt fines for a wide range of crimes, from minor motoring offences to what were seen as miner drug-using offences, is that offences are not recorded on some sort of database.
This means that a person can commit the same offence almost every day of the week and still just pay a small police fine. The second problem is that a small fine is very likely not going to deter any addict.
Under new rules all drug offences now have to go before a magistrate, and special courts are being set up to deal with drug offences, meaning that we will soon have a pool of prosecutors and magistrates with growing experience of these sort of offences and able to apply more consistent sentencing guidelines.
This consistency will be important. We already see how the range of sentencing is making it more difficult to enforce the law and why we need something firmer.
A more solid sentencing policy will see far heavier sentences for repeat offenders who were given some help in their first appearance but now just want to destroy lives, including their own.
These special courts are being backed by the judiciary and the Prosecutor-General who see the need for courts to be firmer and more effective. Magistrates cannot just follow the ideas or retribution put forward by lay people, but do have to take into account public opinion as a factor.
We would notice that the changes are more than likely to require rehabilitation units at some of our prisons, with suitable staff assigned to these prisons. One advantage of having an addict in jail, is that they can be made to go for treatment.
At the same time, we are introducing a system of parole for suitable prisoners, and we would think that a co-operative prisoner who turned in their dealer who is taking treatment seriously and who is willing to continue on release could be a better candidate for parole than some unrepentant addict.
We can combine intolerance for drug crimes with harsher deterrent sentences and yet still give a genuinely repentant user a break.
We can take advantage of their jail time as we do with other crimes in the efforts to convert a prisoner guilty of crimes into someone useful and supporting by the time of their release.
Doing drugs is a personal choice. I don’t know why we spend our meagre resources trying to cuddle these misfits. If doing drugs is not a criminal offence just like taking alcohol, why are drug dealers being arrested but the users are being rehabilitated outside of the prison system?