The government is considering a humane drug policy under which illicit drug users who are arrested would be given treatment for addiction rather than being put on trial and jailed.
This followed recommendations made by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) that the national drug policy would be carried out with full respect for human rights in order to meet the health and welfare of illicit drug users.
It was announced by the Deputy Minister of the Interior, Mr James Agalga when he officially launched the 2015 report of the INCB in Accra yesterday.
Focus on health and welfare
The decision of the government, he explained, was predicated on the findings by the INCB that although the prevention and treatment of drug abuse formed part of the main provisions of the international drug control conventions, in Africa only an estimated one out of 18 people suffering from drug use disorders or drug dependence received treatment each year.
He said it was instructive that a portion of the INCB report said “it is not the case that the world must choose between ‘militarised’ drug law enforcement on one hand and the legalisation of non-medical use of drugs on the other; but rather to put health and welfare at the centre of a balanced drug policy”.
Emerging market
He said the growing middle class in parts of Africa was an emerging market for drugs and that traffickers in search of new illicit markets for cocaine and heroin had targeted the growing middle class.
Such countries like Benin and Namibia, he said, were being used as transit points but were now becoming consumer countries
Mr Agalga said he was aware that the war on illicit drug trafficking had assumed a sophisticated dimension aided by technological advancement but added that Ghana was proud of officers who were up to the task to deal with cyber-narco trafficking.
‘Let’s go after the big guys’
The Executive Secretary of the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB), Mr Yaw Akrasi Sarpong, said there was the need to concentrate efforts on those who trafficked large quantities of illicit drugs.
He explained that it made no economic sense to arrest a drug user and send him to jail where the state would expend resources taking care of him.
Mr Sarpong said through strenuous efforts, the NACOB had succeeded in confiscating the properties of some drug barons.
“Let’s use our scarce resources and go after the big guys. Let’s confiscate their properties,” he stressed.
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