A REGIONAL summit is being proposed in the coming year to look at ways to address the burgeoning drug crisis.
The region has experience working together to address major challenges, COVID-19 being a prime example of collective effort being harnessed in the face of a health and security crisis. All segments of society will be represented from government to medical practitioners, and right on down to the community and grassroots, as well as civil society and religious groups. It can’t happen soon enough.
The Pacific Security College has just released a paper addressing the looming crisis – a surge in the traffic and use of methamphetamines.
The paper’s title Turning the tide together touches on a facet of any envisaged solution that will be key: It will take a collective effort pull back from the brink.
Describing the situation author, Dr Nicholas Thomson didn’t pull any punches.
“The Pacific is facing a rapidly escalating methamphetamine crisis that is no longer confined to trafficking routes but is increasingly affecting the health and security of communities across the region,’’ he said.
“The reverberations are causing numerous negative impacts from health and justice systems that have become stretched beyond their limits, to increased violence and a fraying of the social fabric, that is so critical to our Pasifika way of life.’’
Fiji is perhaps the starkest example cited by Thomson, where needle sharing has become common place among users, leading to the fastest growing HIV epidemic anywhere in the world.
Rarely does something affect a society across all strata from the health sector, to justice, social welfare, the economy and perhaps most fundamental of all, the family unit.
Natural disasters could perhaps be placed in this category. What the region is facing now, if there is no realistic intervention will be a disaster of another kind.
