Drug abusers will no longer be treated as victims but as criminals, a senior government official has said.
Harare Metropolitan Affairs and Devolution secretary Tafadzwa Muguti on Friday said treating drug users as victims will not help in ending the scourge of drug abuse.
He was speaking at the launch of a national anti-drug operation dubbed No To Dangerous Drugs And illicit Substances; See Something Say Something. NewsDay quoted Muguti as saying:
We have stopped looking at rehabilitation first before arrest because that is the mistake we were doing.
If we find someone who is under the influence of drugs, the law says that you can be arrested for being drunk and intoxicated in public.
So as it is, anyone who is found under the influence of drugs is eligible to arrest and they will tell us when they get sober where they would have bought the drug.
If we continue treating drug users as victims while they know exactly where the drugs are coming from, we won’t stop this pandemic.
Police in Harare on Friday arrested 10 drug users and peddlers, with one of them found in possession of 50 bottles of Bron Cleer cough syrup.
During the raid yesterday, several drug users were nabbed at police roadblocks in Southerton.
Muguti said drug dealers are operating mainly from high-density suburbs and transporting the drugs using passenger vehicles. He said:
As you saw today, we have captured a number of drug lords who were actually transporting drugs using passenger vehicles.
We are now aware that drug lords are now using high-density suburbs as safe havens.
Government raised concern over the increasing involvement of schoolchildren in drug and substance abuse and implored school heads to treat drug offences as criminal offences, not as disciplinary offences.