Archives

by Geoff Wijesinghe

With the unprecedentedly large haul of heroin allegedly involving Sri Lankans seized by the Indian authorities in Chennai recently, the drugs problem in this country has once again come into sharp focus.

According to news reports, 40 kilograms of heroin was detected in the possession of a Sri Lankan businessman and a further 50 kilograms had already been smuggled into the country.

Law enforcement agencies, the customs at the entrepots, the Excise Narcotics Bureau and the police, which has a separate arm to combat the drugs menace in the Police Narcotics Bureau, average detections and seizures estimated to amount to only 10 per cent of the actual quantity available, accepted as a norm by all international law enforcement agencies including Interpol.

Heroin is today sold throughout the island and can be found in any marketplace, particularly in the towns and cities.

The problem of heroin smuggling first surfaced in the early 1960s, with isolated cases in the cities, particularly Colombo, being reported. Over the years, it has grown to near unmanageable proportions. As the problem worsened, the National Dangerous Drugs Control Board was established as the central co-ordinating agency to combat the drugs menace.

But, there is big money in drugs trade, the biggest being in heroin.

Originally, the Golden Triangle in Burma was the largest source of supply, by air and sea. However, today most of the heroin is smuggled from the Golden Crescent, where poppy grown in large tracts of land in Afghanistan and are processed in laboratories on the Pakistan border and moved through Mumbai and Chennai to Sri Lanka.

The made mode of smuggling is by boat from the southeast coast of India to the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka, from where heroin is transported to Colombo by road. Colombo North is the distribution hub of this highly priced narcotic, where the merchants of death, protected by heavily armed underworld gangs, carry out their lethal trade.

Heroin addiction has today spread its ugly, oft mortal tentacles even to schools, where it has been found that impressionable teenagers take heroin first for kicks, and then become slaves to the habit, ruining their health, their education, their homes, taking to big time crime and becoming parasites feeding on society.

Some time ago, I was having a late night drink at a large hotel in Colombo Fort with a friend, whom I knew from my school days. It was really a reunion as we had met after long years.

Although from rival schools, our friendship had blossomed. And so, we did not feel the time go by until in the wee hours in the morning. As we were leaving the hotel, my friend opened the door of the nightclub of the hotel and told me to have a look. There, many of the guests, a number of them teenagers, were engaged wild, uninhibited dancing, and did not seem to have any control over their emotions.

Closing the door, my friend started sobbing and said, "This is where my son became a heroin addict". After several attempts to cure his son who had been a fine sportsman in school, my friend dug into his savings and sent the boy to the United States in the hope of having him rehabilitated there.

Another case I know of is that of a young lad, at the time living at the de Zoysa flats, Ratmalana. He is the youngest son of a widow, whose long fight against abject poverty, was rewarded when a foreign family she was working for took her abroad as their housekeeper. Due to her exemplary work and behaviour, she was able to get her daughter, too, a job in the same country as a housekeeper.

As the addiction to heroin grew, the boy became involved in crime and was arrested by the police several times. He even was allegedly involved in the burglary of a boutique at the de Zoysa flats itself.

With his innocent looks, he was able to deceive many. Once, when serving a sentence, he found a sympathetic listener in a jail guard, who fell hook, line and sinker for the errant youth's sob stories.

At the end of the prison term, the jail guard employed the youth as the driver of his scooter taxi. Much to the consternation of the benefactor, after one week, he found both scooter and driver missing. On making inquiries, the jailer found that the drug addict had hocked the vehicle to find money to buy heroin. By now, he needed a minimum of Rs. 500 a day to buy the drug.

If he did not take heroin three times a day, the young man suffered acute bouts of delirium tremens. On different occasions, when he did not have money, the chap was so desperate that he sold his wife's and children's clothes, including that of the youngest, a lovely little girl of two, and even the packet of milk powder bought for her on credit by the mother. He had reached the dregs of degeneration.

In another instance, at dead of night, travelling in a taxi with his family, he was so drugged that he had stopped the vehicle, and tried to sell his wife to the driver. The thoroughly frightened man had sped off into the night. While her husband assaulted her and walked away, the poor stricken woman, her three children crying out in terror, managed to get to the Pettah bus stand from Kotahena and take a bus early morning to her parent's home at Gampaha.

A few months ago, the heroin addict's sister arrived from abroad and spent a large sum of money in having her brother treated in hospital, gifting him with a gold chain, which he wanted. She also paid one year's advance and rented a house for her brother's family and even secured for him a job in the Middle East.

The addict's sister, now quite confident that her brother was healed and sufficiently provided for, returned to her job.

But it is sad to realise that most drug addicts are beyond redemption.

He was in the Middle East only for four months and returned home, complaining of ill health.

He resumed taking heroin on the same day he returned and is back to his life of drug addiction.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager