Evidence-based, data-driven policies to address drug situation, other crimes – Khemraj Ramjattan

The importance of drug observatories in the fight against the illegal drug situation was reiterated throughout the Opening Ceremony of the Regional Seminar for National Drug Observatories in the Caribbean on 4 April, 2018, at the Ramada Princess Hotel, in Georgetown, Guyana.

Speaker after speaker made the case for evidence-based, data-driven policies and practices, and international cooperation to address the illegal drug situation.

 “If there is one thing that I would like to see coming out of this seminar is your emphasis on evidence-based, data-driven policies and practices ….It is … going to reduce the damning situation in drugs and all related crimes and illegalities”, feature speaker, Guyana’s Minister of Public Security, Hon. Khemraj Ramjattan, told the gathering of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) practitioners, policy-makers and researchers in the field.

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The Minister likened drug observatories to the “brains of the society”, tasked with coming up with the relevant evidence-based solutions, policies and practices. In order to do so, he noted,  Observatories must ask the correct questions.

“The correct questions in relation to matters of drugs sometimes lead us, for example, to whether we should legalise the activity or decriminalise the activity…”, he said.

The questions, he said, included: what to do in relation to young people and their beliefs; stopping transshipment at the borders, given we are in the hub;  how to stop or reduce demand and how to get international cooperation.

The Minister noted that international cooperation was vital and one of the bases for working together to ensure that the scourge of drugs was extirpated from our societies.

The two-day seminar is being held in collaboration with the Government of Guyana and the Inter American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD).

It aims  to strengthen the capacity of representatives to gather, analyse and report on drug-related information and to enable the development of evidence-based drug policies and programmes.  It is an activity  of the response under the Drug Demand Reduction (DDR) component of the Tenth European Development Fund (EDF) Crime and Security Programme between the European Union and CARIFORUM.

The DDR component seeks to strengthen institutional capacity of national and regional drug demand reduction entities and practitioners to effectively develop strategies and implement policies and programmes in CARIFORUM. The use of illicit drugs continues to rise in CARIFORUM countries and a lack of institutional capacity has been identified as one of the challenges in the response to this issue.