Time to review the drugs policy
WHEN even the son of the Prime Ministry’s driving force against drugs has been arrested for alleged possession and outgoing deputy prime minister Serdar Denktaş himself calls for a review of national drug policy, maybe it is time to take stock.
It’s a sensitive subject arousing understable fear among parents over what has fast become an epidemic of recreational drug abuse, and particularly over the emergence of new man-made drugs which can kill.
The consumption of Bonzai, or synthetic cannabis, has claimed more than a dozen lives in the TRNC since 2014 and is blamed for having caused many traffic accidents.
Indeed what some observers have dubbed a parallel “mobile traffic epidemic” weighs heavily on the country, as some drivers take to the roads under the influence of alcohol or illegal drugs, sometimes with devastating consequences.
Yet this Frankenstein drug was developed by John William Huffman, an American Professor Emeritus of chemistry, funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse to research remedies for multiple sclerosis and Aids and help patients undergoing chemotherapy because the use of cannabis was proscribed by law even for research purposes.
Recreational use of Bonzai began in Germany in 2000 and has claimed young lives worldwide ever since, until the law caught up with it.
Mr Denktaş was criticised during the election campaign for “courting the junkie vote”, but his call for a policy review, research into medical marijuana, and a study of recent worldwide moves to raise social funding via taxation and lessen the hold of suppliers on the illegal black market, is in tune with thinking in other Western countries.
Just as important is the treatment of offenders and the potential criminalisation of vulnerable youngsters.
Now the election dust is settling, these issues deserve a considered hearing and comprehensive research. A new government must guard against rushing into ill-thought-out legislation which, in other spheres and coupled with failure to enforce, often ushers in a new swathe of unanticipated problems.