Drugs: Seizure of narcotics precursor materials eye opener

There was an impression that the fight against drugs and the thinning out of availability of drugs in the streets, such that plenty of testimonies were being obtained from repenting users of drugs, some of them going to rehab centres, was sufficient. Little did they realise that drug networks reconstitute in a rapid way, nestling if any control gap is noticed.

In that case the  proper news in that area isn’t that there was a shipment of material for making drugs that was about to be offloaded into the market to nefarious effects but that there is still a control network that is alive and kicking. In that sense that appeared to be the real news in that event, namely that drug makers had taken heart that things were cooling down, or had settled enough for a shipment of materials for making narcotics to land and pass into the street, into stores and then become hard drugs. Catching that shipment is an indication that control is working.

There is however reason to worry, on the basis of wisdom concerning the drug trade, that when the public hears little about it, this may also indicate that little is taking place, and when stories come up of shipments being caught or materials intercepted, then it means activity is rising. The premise of that wisdom is they call a ‘normal curve’ in statistics, of a natural way in which social behaviour can be predicted, that a portion of the traffic shall be noticed, and the larger portion can’t be noticed. In that case the issue is whether this psychological rule applies here.

The normal curve wisdom applies most of the time though there are circumstances when it doesn’t always apply, and many shall hope that the situation obtaining here is charismatic enough to raise controls above normal curve probability.  That is only a possibility in the sense that there has been energetic government efforts to sort out irresponsibility in the government concerning essential issues for which the government has set its eyes to resolve, and drugs is one of those things. In that case seizure may reflect the countercurrent, drug traffickers getting no cooperation.

Some will say that this is too good to be true, that the image of change in the police force is bringing about a situation where drug making materials can’t pass, whereas things were already settling down. It is also possible that seizing the shipment is part of ‘new normal’ where the level of control and seizure is quite high, and those who are in a position to cooperate being fewer or unable to so do. Cooperation is usually based on an officer not expecting his position to be at risk in cooperating, and a clear shift of weather to risky was prevailing in past week in the police force.

That is clearly what a skeptic would discover, in which case the shipment was true enough a logical expectation that things were settling down but something else occurred, an unexpected crisis especially on account of the  Mkuranga-Kibiti spate of shooting of police officers, local government officials and CCM leaders. This crisis led to top level overhaul of police force leadership and ripples across the special police zone of Dar es Salaam where a new IGP was picked. That also needs to settle down before networks can reconstitute, as they surely will. Thus nabbing a shipment of making narcotic drugs is more a pointer to gaps, not proof of change.