The recent conference on violence by the Pan-American Health  Organization and the Ministry of Health  brought very forcibly to light the sizeable proportion of the Health budget used in it’s management. When we add to this the amount spent by the Ministry of National Security and Justice  we arrive at no small sum. It has been well established that certain social order and crime  go together , poverty and education,  population and overcrowding,  and  drugs and drug trafficking.

The Police Commissioner had admitted that the various plans to combat the situation
have not met with the success expected.
What he did not know was that they were destined to fail for the very simple reason that  crime and violence are  products of the social order which springs from the polices of the government.
And the role the police was instructed to play only added in certain instances to the problem.
The sociologist and  psychologists  tell us that  abused children often grow into adulthood not only as child abusers but often as  reactors against the abuses suffered in childhood. And in this education is the key element. 

Psychologically the uninformed adult is in many ways a  child .And like a child he learns,   develops   and reacts as one. Any parent knows the wrath of a child to a promise not fulfilled. The child knows also his basic needs and rights. Deny him  those  and you are begging for trouble.  Add to this the physical and other abuses to which our children are often subjected and for which they can see no reason  and we are begging for lots more trouble.

It is in the area of drugs and drug trafficking that we see all these factors at work in the adult  The ganja smoker for e.g. whether for religious,  social or  health reason gets a certain satisfaction from his spliff. In so doing he is harming no one he maintains. Treated like a child not only is he denied his right to do so but he is also subjected to the added abuse of being made a criminal for life  and  becomes part of that social order where education and habitat are well below the norm. He has long  since lost faith in leaders to whom he had looked for his basic needs and the defense of his  human rights  He is tired and frustrated over promises unfulfilled. (Put us in. Vote for me and your worries are over). He wants his offspring to “come out” better than himself. He does not see it happening. He realizes that that the money that should have been used to help do this has been used instead to build remand centres to put his friends and associates who have been increasingly subjected to the same abuses meted out to him. (In the USA President Reagan cut the education vote to build more prisons to house  run more drug offenders.) Subconsciously his world gradually becomes one of hopelessness. Survival depends on him, and the reactions against the society for the abuses begin . Then from his leaders he begins to hear words like zero tolerance and values and attitudes. And the government wonders that there is an increase in crime and violence.
 
In the early 1980’s the Govt launched a most vicious attack on the marijuana plant. Fields were sprayed from helicopters and in the process destroying other crops and sometimes livestock. Police carried out raids kicking down doors at nights. There was a migration of able bodied young men from the rural areas into the already overcrowded inner cities of Kingston. I saw the Coptics, a most peaceful and energetic organization  hounded away from their farms.  Arriving at the hospital one morning  I found a young American student in a bed handcuffed to the railing at the same time being guarded by an armed security officer. He was on a tour around the island and got caught with a spliff.  He  became ill in the  filthy prison cell and was transferred in the night. I often read in the papers of  judges pontificating  on the evils of this thing and in one instance sentencing a young pregnant mother to prison. One day I received  a most polite  letter of supplication from the Supt of Police asking me if I would be so kind as to help him out by keeping two children in the hospital for him for six weeks. Their mother was found peddling ganja on the streets for a living, there was no father, she was from another parish  and the judge had sent her to prison for six weeks. Poor Supt. I said then.  And gladly accepted his two “orphans” 
Today I go further and say sadly  Poor police. For here we have a society riddled with crime and violence which had its genesis long ago in the policies, direction and administration of successive governments. And now we have them calling on the police to do more about the situation. The police was not  the creators of the criminal society. Their role has always been the  solution of crimes when committed. The prevention of crime and  the restoration of the society to some degree of normality therefore must  be the responsibility of the  creators. The tragedy of the whole picture is that successive governments have known what to do . Why they have not done so is quite another matter.

  I have used the example of ganja because it brings out so many aspects of the crime and violence spectrum.   According to the law in this free democratic society you may if you so wish smoke cigarettes, recognized by the scientific community as insidiously  the most dangerous drug in common use today.. But you cannot smoke marijuana recognized by the same community as the least dangerous of them all. You do not have that right.  When the US made marijuana a prohibited substance in 1937  no scientific evidence was produced to support the claims made  to justify the extreme measures adopted.  Those claims have to date not been verified. Like Mr Bush and his weapons of mass destructions we have for the past sixty years been  subjecting our people to these very harsh measures ranging  from prison without the option of a fine to criminality for life  on an illusion .The tragedy is  compounded further in that for its prohibition in 1937 the major role was played by racism and money power. On the one hand it was the  insolent niggers and murderous Mexicans that were using it.  On the other was Randolph Hearst and his paper empire using the New York Herald Tribune as the chief propaganda machine to daily warn the American Public of  “this terrible agent of mass destruction” growing in the fields, river beds and roadsides which turns young Americans into rapists and murderers and cause the niggers to create this satanic music called jazz which makes white women tap their feet when they hear it.

If the Govt is really serious about the crime and violence situation its first duty is radical changes in the laws and management of the drug trade in general and marijuana in particular. Let me repeat what I together with so many highly placed individuals in so many other countries  have been  saying for so many years. Take the crime out of drugs. Regulate and in the process use the revenue earned to educate the people to reduce consumption. The answer to the drug and violence situation is not force but education. It worked with alcohol and prohibition. It is working today with cigarette smoking, the most dangerous of them all. It will work also with marijuana, coke and the lot.
All it needs is a Govt with a clear vision and will and the courage to do what they know they ought to do.



These are the views of Dr R.G.Lampart.
They do not refect Bob Marley School feelings on this matter
but give everyone a plateform like this to voice opinions of everyone, You make your own decision!