It is high time that the Ministry of Education develop strategies to tackle the problem of drugs in schools
Hardly anyone batted an eyelid when the Stabroek News reported on February 16th last that the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit of the Guyana Police Force has unearthed “a drug ring inside two Georgetown Secondary schools” and that following police investigations charges were expected to be laid “soon.”
This was by no means the first time that reports had surfaced regarding the pedaling and use of drugs in the school system in Guyana even though the customary absence of subsequent disclosure on these kinds of incidents by either the police or the Ministry of Education has means that details are usually few, particularly those that have to do with the responses of the authorities to these developments and such measures as being are put in place to attempt to respond to the challenge. The truth is that the Ministry of Education appears to favour a more-or-less ‘silent’ approach to problems of this kind, driven, it seems by a line of reasoning that if it remains quiet for long enough the problem will go away. That approach has not worked and it is high time that the Ministry wakes up to that reality.
Fortunately for concerned audiences, not least parents of school-age children, there are sources of information that can sometimes be no less reliable than those regarded as official ones. What, one suspects, is the posture of ‘discretion’ by the Ministry of Education, for example, is, in reality, a seeming lack of any structured awareness of the problem of the proliferation of drugs in schools and accordingly its inability to proffer any structured solution to the problem. The next best bet, therefore, has been to resort to the teachers who are not only located ‘in the belly of the beast,’ so to speak, but who are sometimes – on condition of anonymity – far more forthcoming in their ‘offerings’ on the problem.
