The war on drugs has to be a single point priority in Goa. But it’s a war without generals, strategy or even foot soldiers. A hapless government watches as Goan drug lords compete and do better than their Nigerian counterparts, police stations in the coastal belt are not centers of control and prevention but hotspots for clandestine facilitation, and the brutal social impact of this menace spreads from the coastal belts to the interiors of Salcete. Yes, this is no longer a tourist problem or a Nigerian problem and someone else’s problem. It is really ours.
And while huge protests against garbage dumped from other villages rise as a part of the NIMBY (Not in my backyard) philosophy, drugs are eating into the very vials of Goan society and are doing much more damage than even alcohol. The death of two boys in their mid twenties, due to drug overdose in Curtorim, was a jolt to the idyllic visage of Salcete. The horror is hitting home. The reasons why North Goa was castigated are now coming to haunt Salcete’s tintos church yards, football fields, village roads and bridges.
Herald sees this as the single biggest detriment to our society and the biggest impediment to the futures of our children. And its coverage, in this edition that you are reading includes the situation in the damned North coastal belt, where young boys (and perhaps girls too) are being used as carriers, suppliers and begin their innings and carry on as consumers. This is a generation which is being used by the Nigerian drug gangs, who continue to move around, many of them without passports and other papers, with numerous cases against them as well as the local home grown gangs, such as the one led by Omkar and Runal Palyekar. But it is obvious that the movement of drugs is rampant from the coastal belts into the interior heartland. Your newspaper hit the ground running and travelled extensively through Salcete to gather evidence of this. We have no reason to believe that Valpoi and Satarri are unaffected by this or for that matter Sanguem and Quepem.
This marks a huge shift in the template of drug consumption and distribution. The dangerous shift though is that when drugs move into quintessential non-coastal Goan villages devoid of tourists and affect local children, it is no longer a part of the tourist, drug dealer, corrupt cop script. The other aspect of this trend is that local youth from interior villages are moving into the coasts to purchase and are moving back to their safe villages to consume. And there are no checks at the consumption point.
Meanwhile the coastal villages, especially of North Goa have gone completely out of control. From Calangute to Baga, Anjuna and Chapora and then to Morjim and Ashwem, the police and politicians have ceded ground. While raids on nightclubs to “rescue” girls is a headline grabbing activity, the inflow and distribution and the leap in consumption of drugs has never really been addressed by local MLAs. A restaurant that runs illegally and sells drugs in the open on Anjuna’s coast has never been shut by the panchayat or the police. One IPS SP Vijay Singh who tried doing so and had even paraded the owners of the notorious shack in public was abused by minister Dayanand Mandrekar, for doing more than his job and transferred.
The war against drugs can be fought and won because it is a tangible challenge as opposed to the war against corruption which is intangible. The Anti Narcotics Cell needs to be augmented and expanded, with dedicated police personnel in every station reporting to the ANC SP who in turn should report directly to the Chief Secretary who in turn will brief the Chief Minister. This war has to be fought thorough unconventional means without the help of the local police in thana areas, because they and their political masters are not a part of the solution but a part of the problem.
