The star­tling drug bust by of­fi­cers from the Cus­toms and Ex­cise di­vi­sion at the Port of Point Lisas makes it clear that long held con­cerns about the porous­ness of Trinidad and To­ba­go's ports of en­try for goods have a sol­id ba­sis. The seizure may well have been one of the largest gan­ja hauls made at a port in this coun­try, con­sti­tut­ing a tonne of high-grade Ari­zona mar­i­jua­na worth $30 mil­lion. The 38 bags of com­pressed mar­i­jua­na were found stashed in a re­frig­er­at­ed con­tain­er hid­den among bags of frozen chick­en parts, a new twist on traf­fick­ing tech­niques.

Of­fi­cers searched 32 con­tain­ers that were said to "fit a par­tic­u­lar pro­file" be­fore find­ing the mas­sive drug stash. Cus­toms of­fi­cers at­tribute the seizure to new sur­veil­lance and mon­i­tor­ing pro­ce­dures in place at the port and the March 10 haul of $12 mil­lion worth of mar­i­jua­na at the port of­fers fur­ther tes­ti­mo­ny to the re­freshed fo­cus on port se­cu­ri­ty as a means of stem­ming crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

The state of emer­gency has al­so mo­ti­vat­ed a pol­i­cy of 100 per cent pack­age search­es for goods be­ing shipped in­to T&T via air freight; this pro­ce­dure may well pro­vide valu­able in­tel­li­gence on whether this point of en­try is be­ing abused to ship il­le­gal goods in­to the coun­try, but which Cus­toms and Ex­cise must al­so know will cre­ate un­ten­able and un­sus­tain­able de­lays in ship­ping that will in­evitably toss sand in the gears of com­merce. The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is one which pro­vides an op­por­tu­ni­ty for fun­da­men­tal changes in se­cu­ri­ty process­es and pro­ce­dures, both be­cause of the pow­ers of­fered by the state of emer­gency and the cur­rent state of height­ened tol­er­ance among the pop­u­la­tion for mea­sures that are in­con­ve­nient but seem like­ly to lead to im­proved se­cu­ri­ty.

More fine-grained search­es should es­tab­lish tech­niques and sys­tems used by crim­i­nals to game ex­ist­ing se­cu­ri­ty and high­light weak­ness­es in these pro­tec­tive mea­sures. In re­view­ing the suc­cess­es of this in­creased mon­i­tor­ing of the coun­try's ports, the Cus­toms and Ex­cise di­vi­sion should look to more ef­fi­cient meth­ods such as im­ple­ment­ing im­proved tech­nolo­gies ca­pa­ble of scan­ning con­tain­er con­tents. One of the im­ple­men­ta­tions dri­ven by the 9/11 Com­mis­sion is a dri­ve to scan­ning of all con­tain­ers ar­riv­ing in the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States us­ing a range of ra­di­ol­o­gy tech­niques. This mea­sure has dra­mat­i­cal­ly im­proved both the tech­nolo­gies utilised for car­go scan­ning and the com­mer­cial avail­abil­i­ty of such sys­tems.

These pro­phy­lac­tic mea­sures should be on­ly one pin­cer in any ef­fort at clamp­ing down on drug traf­fick­ing, how­ev­er. This coun­try has es­tab­lished a Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit (FIU) and in­creased its mon­i­tor­ing of sus­pi­cious fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions, re­quir­ing more strin­gent re­port­ing of the sources of large trans­fers of mon­ey through the for­eign ex­change sys­tem. The FIU should al­so be rais­ing its tech­nol­o­gy game with an­a­lyt­i­cal sys­tems ca­pa­ble of re­view­ing mass­es of raw fi­nan­cial da­ta to de­ter­mine pat­terns of spend­ing or un­sub­stan­ti­at­ed funds that might raise red flags wor­thy of re­view and in­spec­tion.

It re­mains un­clear whether these large drug hauls were to be un­packed in Trinidad and To­ba­go or if they were sched­uled to be tran­shipped to oth­er ports along with the le­gal car­go on their man­i­fests, but drug use and drug-re­lat­ed crime re­main a crit­i­cal is­sue for not just cit­i­zens, but al­so for the courts of Trinidad and To­ba­go. De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the open­ing of the 2011/12 law term at the Con­vo­ca­tion Hall at the Hall of Jus­tice on Fri­day, Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie sound­ed a warn­ing that the ju­di­cia­ry was con­cerned about the ris­ing in­flux of drug cas­es, so much so that it was in­ves­ti­gat­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion of Drug Treat­ment Courts in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Such drug courts would seek to man­age cas­es by re­plac­ing tra­di­tion­al pun­ish­ment with cours­es of treat­ment and so­cial rem­e­dy that fo­cus on re­turn­ing the chem­i­cal­ly de­pen­dent to pro­duc­tive work and par­tic­i­pa­tion in so­ci­ety. These ini­tia­tives have proven to be par­tic­u­lar­ly ef­fec­tive in pro­vid­ing both strong mo­ti­va­tion and a re­al world op­por­tu­ni­ty for a sec­ond chance for first-time of­fend­ers and would do much to light­en the load of tra­di­tion­al court sys­tems, which would be freed to deal with traf­fick­ers and re­peat of­fend­ers prone to re­cidi­vism.