Ali­cia Llanos

The Min­istry of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment has be­gun to draft a Drug Treat­ment and Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Act.Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment, Dr Lin­coln Dou­glas, said the act would ad­dress the lim­i­ta­tions in com­pre­hen­sive ap­proach­es to im­prove sub­stance-abuse treat­ment and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion ser­vices in T&T.He said so yes­ter­day at the Or­gan­i­sa­tion of Amer­i­can States' Caribbean Re­gion­al Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Mech­a­nism Meet­ing for the train­ing and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gramme at Kapok Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.Dou­glas said the act would pro­vide the nec­es­sary frame­work need­ed to gov­ern in­sti­tu­tion­al func­tion­ing.He said it al­so would serve as a man­age­ment and qual­i­ty as­sur­ance tool for the im­ple­men­ta­tion of ef­fec­tive mea­sures for sus­tain­able re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion and so­cial rein­te­gra­tion of sub­stance abusers.

Dou­glas said a ma­jor down­fall in T&T's fight against drug abuse was the lack of re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion ser­vices and trained per­son­nel.He said at present there were sev­er­al small treat­ment fa­cil­i­ties in T&T of­fered by the State and non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions (NGOs).Dou­glas said with­out the reg­u­la­to­ry leg­is­la­tion or laws, those treat­ment fa­cil­i­ties were not gov­erned by any spe­cif­ic com­pul­so­ry and in­clu­sive reg­u­la­to­ry mech­a­nisms.

He said in­creased care was need­ed for youth and women.Dou­glas said ac­cord­ing to a 2005 sur­vey of youth cor­rec­tion­al fa­cil­i­ties, ap­prox­i­mate­ly half of all ju­ve­nile of­fend­ers on drug re­lat­ed charges re­port­ed cur­rent drug use.He added: "This da­ta serves as a clear in­di­ca­tion that pro­vi­sions must be made to treat with ado­les­cents, since there are no spe­cial fa­cil­i­ties to ac­com­mo­date this seg­ment ex­ist­ing in T&T."

Re­gard­ing fe­male sub­stance abusers, Dou­glas said re­search in­di­cat­ed that four out of ten women in T&T pris­ons re­port­ed drugs were con­nect­ed in some way to their con­vic­tion.He said ac­cord­ing to re­search 65.8 per cent of these women were in­volved in the drug trade.Dou­glas al­so an­nounced that the Na­tion­al Al­co­hol and Drug Abuse Pre­ven­tion Pro­gramme (NADAPP) would be moved soon un­der the port­fo­lio of the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment.He said that move was sug­gest­ed un­der the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion.Dou­glas added: "I am con­fi­dent this new align­ment will reap ben­e­fits in terms of im­proved ser­vice de­liv­ery to the peo­ple of T&T."