Drug Abuse in Maldives

Drug abuse is a social problem, which, sadly, is abundant in the Maldives. Drug use cannot be curbed through retribution. To all you smokers out there - how many times have you tried to quit unsuccessfully? Well, drugs, such as heroin, cocaine and 'brown sugar', are infinitely more addictive than cigarettes. How can you expect the addiction to go away by locking people up? Some of the messages on this guestbook have suggested that we kill all drug users - of course we may be able to get rid of some individuals, but drug abuse would still persist as a social problem. There would be waves of new drug addicts to fill the places of those we 'kill', and as such, 'killing' drug users would be most absurd and futile, if we are to deal with the issue rather than target specific individuals. We can only deal with this and other similar social problems, like housing, income disparities etc., through a more democratic and accountable system of government. Thus our problems lie in the political sphere. As regards substance abuse, we have to effectively identify and restrict the channels through which these substances are brought into the country, build more effective institutional mechanisms to deal with drug abuse as a social problem grounded in a more rehabilitative approach, easy access to counselling and support structures to operate with existing [or ideally strengthened] familial ties to identify and deal with new drug users and recovering drug addicts - instead of locking them up, more informative and substantive  awareness programmes need to be conducted at schools and the like with talks by recovering drug addicts and experts on the reality of drug abuse. Of course this would require that we build an education system conducive to breeding qualified sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists for one thing.

Posted by Dylan on my guestbook.