THE drug casualties in Guyana are a phenomenon of indifference and torment; from the landlord who allows his/her real estate to become a drug-yard; to the law enforcement officer who betrays a citizen to drug sellers, after that citizen has provided information; to the lawyer and accountant who guides his cartel client on how to escape his murders and hide his money under pseudo-legality.

The Biblical differentiations of ‘Hell and Heaven’ exist right on earth, or parallels do. The purgatory of torment resides with the families who must live and endure the monster that drug addiction has created out of a relative. They must summon resources already depleted from meeting the demands of maintaining a reasonable home with its modernised economic impositions, combined with all the responsibilities of sustaining a family, then to be drained by the damaged and twisted drug mind that once was a brother, son, father, mother or sister. Eventually they must command the strength of the ancient age of shadows and abandon that loved one, a sacrifice to the creatures of the social pit, and then struggle to find peace within themselves as a family, after such a savage act done, to survive, else all be dragged into the pit. They pray and some contemplate revenge, the kind from the movies where the village folk storm the Vampire’s castle. The scourge of mind-altering drugs is not new to human history, it was used to destabilise populations by foreign states and to disable local populations in Asia by oppressive hierarchies millennia ago. It is a political tool, but it also does not discriminate, for it is a relentless scourge when unleashed. The declining economics of the mid 70s in Guyana saw the rise of marijuana first, then the cocaine dollar spiral in this country as an attractive portal out of an obvious cycle of poverty for many, and to finance business problems, when by 2001, Stabroek News published an article, ‘In 18 months 600 firms taken to court by banks’.
But it also enveloped our consciousness with its nature and infused its laws and dictates of ruthlessness, enslaving, possessing and destroying with impunity, as it rendered the social consciousness impotent with its financial and machismo rewards, exposing the balance of morality versus callous, but never the less, the opportunistic excitement of meaningful glitter and glamour. To many who could not have conceptualised instant grandeur upon such a Genie’s wish before, the perfect ‘Crab Barrel’ drama unfolded in Guyana, where the result justified the means, where the consequences were somebody else’s contention and problem.

The consequences of the ‘Crab Barrel’ fell upon the families and offspring of those with ego, the few with medical afflictions who saw no way out, and the ‘shut button’ naive with no restraint, with ‘wanna-be’ desires to fit in with anything that waved before them that professed ‘hype’, indulged and became the first wave of addicts. During that period, a former school friend came home with tremendous money and suave, bought a house in Prashad Nagar and invited me to a party there. I went. Literally, he had a silver platter with cocaine on a table and people, some I knew, were pulling this poison up there nostrils. I slipped out, not before pounding some related friends, some from boyhood. I refer to cocaine as ‘poison’ because I had read a lot on drugs. Cocaine is a product extracted from the coca leaf but the process is what terrifies. The leaves are soaked in a vat with sulphuric acid several times a day for about four days. The extracted liquid will be mixed with lime (which is also used in combat and mass graves situations on corpses to extract the body liquids). Then this mixture is added gasoline and ammonia, the latter is an agricultural item among other uses, that if handled without gloves can burn your hands – I saw that happen at Amazon Chemicals. Acetone, ether and hydrochloric acid are added to form a crystalline powder. In Guyana, this is further ‘cooked’ to make crack cocaine. Knowing this toxic process delivers you from ever wanting to touch that crap known on the streets as ‘de Jumbie’. More than one visitor to that party became addicted for years. My friend from Laing Avenue recovered enough to become a taxi driver before he migrated. Inhaling that contraption of poisonous fumes will affect normal brain activity for years, with constant relapses. I disagree with the medical people that drug addiction is a disease. I consider it from my experience an affliction of bad choices with terrible consequences, especially for family members. Some people use that stuff and never become addicts, while others for the first time become hooked. Our metabolism isn’t easily understood, it’s simply different strokes for different folks.

I argued with a close buddy in business for years on the dangers of the ‘Jumbie’. A dealer with a long streetwise background from the Avenue told me he couldn’t sell drugs anymore, because of what people were prepared to do for a hit. My ‘close buddy’ was a progressive businessman. All his ideas were innovative, but he couldn’t put the nexus between his party drug habit and why he screwed up progressive ideas. When he died, and he died alone, because relationships are turbulent with addicts, his cousin told me that “there was no evidence that anyone in that house ate.” I was so angry I didn’t go to his funeral, nor to meet his kids and their mothers, who I knew for most their lives. The fate of Guyana’s addicts and street walkers rest with the building of a facility somewhere in the Northwest, where they can be occupied in physical road building, be well fed and conditioned to recreate the rudiments of normalcy, with counselling sessions, rather than be hinged to the purgatory of the drug yards, betwixt life and slow death.