The lure of narcotics, the forbidden fruit

GROWING up, most of my peers stayed away from alcohol because the antics of the drunk were defined as the results of ‘devil soup,’ as all alcoholic beverages were described. The display much later in the early-mid 1970s of the ganja-smoking, ‘Bag clothing Brethren’ who then defined Rasta, and the mystic high of marijuana was not inspiring to many of us just yet. What consolidated my permanent step aside was the incident I have written about before; of an area neighbour who was accused of killing a bank manager in 1979, who told me that he saw two of the men, panicked and fired at one. I learned from that part of West Ruimveldt’s local mystic wise head ‘Decomali,’ who had seen among other things a spectral horseman rise out of the space in front of the range where I lived, long before the movie ‘The Headless Horseman ‘ came to the screen and on TV in Guyana. Deco had insisted that when you smoke Marijuana “Yuh does see visions, which was what happen, he see de man astral body.” Not convinced, I explored the U.S. Embassy – then the USIS library on Main and Bentick Streets, enquiring about marijuana and visions? I then came into contact with two words that would become part of my active vocabulary forever: ‘Hallucinogens and Tetrahydrocannabinol,’ or it’s much easily pronounced abbreviation, THC.

What was my further speculation back then was what our mystic wise head Decomali was using over the years? But then ‘Heights’ and ‘Devil Soup,’ ‘Daru’ and ‘Sagiwhang’ took seats on the folk vocabulary bench. The ‘White Lady Jumbie’ had always been the hostile spirit of the planter’s wife enraged beyond death at the Afro community whose women lured the Massah into forbidden relationships and commitments; most likely it was the other way around. However, the ‘White Lady’ that returned to Guyana in the late 70s and 80s was rightfully called on the streets the “Jumbie,” because that’s what crack cocaine turned out to be.
I can remember talking to one of two brothers who lived in Kitty. They were two of the first grassroot exponents of cocaine known to me; others would follow. I had advised him not to bring crack to GT, but he argued about businessmen in the business, and one set ah people can’t mek all de Cheese; how people in authority were making airstrips in the bush,to accommodate cocaine drug shipments; about marijuana fields that a top Boche had on the highway. His arguments were compelling, but I was by then witnessing destruction through ganja in our communities and cocaine was far worse, more destructive, and our national economy, much less the grassroot economy, could not deal with the fallout of drug houses in our towns and villages.

I was invited by an elder school mate who had returned to Guyana; he had bought a place in Prashad Nagar. He as a kind of a ‘Don,’ the influence of extreme ‘Conspicuous consumption’ was mesmerizing local minds who could see no other way to set deh self up in life, or so the thinking went. There was a silver platter at the party with cocaine on it. A younger brother to my knowledge, from Laing Avenue, became an addict after that party. The host of that party, the two brothers from Kitty and many more are all dead now. The White Lady or as the most ancients called her Mama Koka the sorceress, is a heartless goddess; a jumbie like no other. Drug addiction, from alcohol to cocaine, is linked to an impairment to learn, to apply logic and fence with ideas. Conversations have to be narrowed to a small space before it peters out into an unrelated area, especially if the addict initiated the subject and you are introducing opposing arguments, which require references that expand to other platforms. Then there is rage as if you are attacking an invasive persona to free logic, imagination and intelligent reasoning at any normal capacity, this drug manifest persona needs to be on an unchallenged pedestal to expound a concocted perspective continuously.

I woke up without any self contribution to this phenomenon and found that I had an offspring with an addiction, so I live it, I learn from it, and seek to understand from literature I had put aside, how the human mind and spirit can be mangled into unthinkable macabre shapes. That experience brought me closer to understanding the dynamics of a broken society, where lazy and indifferent authorities assume that everything will fix itself; they need do nothing, but repair their own impoverished needs and delusional wants. In Guyana, it began with depletion of the teaching corps, the failure of the public education system to strengthen and maintain its mandate, as teachers left, and salaries dwindled in the 90s, lessons became the first private schools, unlike the lessons of my school days.
Many parents including myself, as our children were sent as a result of Common Entrance passes we were unpleased with, then chose private schools (not everyone had connections to have our children fitted into schools they didn’t earn). So far nothing was quite extremely alarming about what was transpiring then, except that the most vibrant state accommodated the economic reality of the 90s onwards was the rise of the Narco plus- nouveau riche, Guyana’s new business sector, that would infiltrate most that existed before.

Following our customs they sent their children to the very private schools, intending but not quite understanding that education is a cultural process that should have begun with then, and cannot necessarily be bought, so their children expounded with designer clothing and extraordinary pocket pieces, recruiting and eliminating students, creating a culture of a new class of contempt, bullying and ignorance, most private schools ignored the bullying and turned their gazes of authority from their more reliable financial sources and gift-bringers. So confused young minds rejecting the culture of their parents as arcane, strenuous and not able to compete with the new ‘Joneses’ keeping pertinent facts away from parents, secretly embraced the criminal state through its empowered political street bodyguards as the only certainty, and became drug dealers involved in criminal activities, hitmen, snitches and henchmen, drug mules and kept women as the criminal state would have it; and eventually as victims of these damaged souls, they couldn’t understand, who had wooed their naivety, but only saw them as pawns to be sacrificed when the time was ripe.

Guyana, because too many persons in authority surrendered that authority with logical and deceptive arguments of economic survival and greed, will not discuss that period of a retrogressive cultural shift, that still is influencing individual decisions today. We can only persevere to repair our own private victims and damaged souls, but we must never forget, nor forgive, until that day of atonement occurs. Next week, we venture to better understand the philosophy that empowers this lure of prevalent substance abuse, as we welcome the institutional efforts to address its damning effects.
Pic saved as delamentables