Ghana ranked drugs transit point

The International Narcotic Control Bard’s (INCB) Report of the year 2001 cites Ghana as a major transit point of heroin and cocaine. The report portrays a negative picture of the country before the international community, which hitherto, viewed Ghana as one of the most respected countries in the world.

Launching the report at a ceremony in Accra on Friday, the World Health Organsation (WHO) Representative in Ghana, Dr Melville George, said that globalisation and the new communication technologies could be blamed for changing the way people live and its inherent dangers, which some individuals undermined for their illicit gains.

“More than ever before, drug traffickers have become criminals without borders and their activities spread across several jurisdiction. They use the internet to commit crimes and new technologies to agree on illicit drug sales and purchase onlines,” he said. Dr George said that phone cloning enabled drug traffickers to carry out their businesses undetected for several years, adding, “the new technologies has also made crimes easier to commit.”

“Prospective drug chemists and drug traffickers no longer need special contacts or resources; they can find such much needed information on the internet search engines which permit them to locate supply sources of which the user would otherwise have been ignorant,” he said. Dr George said, INCB recommends to government to establish specialised interagency high-technology drug units to provide critical infrastructure to protect their information and intelligence database from criminals.

The INCB, he said, was particularly concerned that young people were at risk from drug dealers in cyberspace using the internet since they would be drawn into drug related crimes by misinformation, propaganda or brainwash on the part of unseen individuals whose aim is to profit from a larger drug abusing population. He said it had been proven that cannabis was stronger and more destructive to the human body than tobacco and alcohol because of its diverse long-term effects.

The Chief Director of the Interior, Mr Edwin Barnes, said, narcotics were a menace to society and called for a collaborated effort to fight them in the country. He said it was a shame for Ghana to be the transit point of heroin and cocaine as indicated in the report. The report, he noted, implied that a lot should be done by putting up Narcotic Board offices in the regions to check the trafficking of the drugs to the other countries. He hoped that this year’s report would not indicate that Ghana continued to be a transit point for drugs but rather portray her as a country with zero-tolerance for drug trafficking