Is the government protecting the youth from drugs?
23 Apr 2014, 10:22 PM
Ahmed Rilwan
Last weekend’s raid of the Anbaraa island music festival was defended by police as being part of law enforcement efforts to “safeguard youth and the society from dangers of drugs”.
But how successful are the current methods in keeping the youth away from drugs?
Beginning with soft drugs in the seventies, and later with the introduction of heroin around 1993, the drugs issue became a national epidemic in the nineties with the number of drug-related offenses increasing rapidly since that time.
The National Drug Use Survey (NDUS) of 2011-2012, conducted by the UNODC, revealed that there were 7,496 drug users aged between 15 and 64 years in the Maldives. According to the survey, 72 percent of the drug using population was under the age of 24, and 48 percent of the drug users in the capital Malé were between 15 and 19 years.
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