Memo to drug couriers 

Time after time, it will happen again. Better not imagined, is the tears of agony that comes with it, especially for the families of those involved. But, will they ever learn? I’m not sure. The drug deal must have felt too good, for a word to be enough for the wise. So, they will always get a memo.

Indeed, another of such memo came through from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, recently, when an intending drug courier, and his drug kingpin host and sponsor got served a memo through their arrest for being in possessing of 93 pellets of cocaine and a masterplan to use the courier who came from Italy, as his recruit on July 21, 2023. But fortunately the drug baron and his recruit were caught right in the act.

Interestingly, the process of recruiting illicit drug couriers for the drug criminal acts has been in existence since drug trafficking became a huge criminal business in the early 1980s. As noted in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, vol. 22, issue 1-2, published in 1998: “However, trafficking of heroin and cocaine has become a serious social problem in Nigeria in the last decade and is second only to politics as the country’s most serious social problem. During this period, a whole new market involving supplies of raw materials and a distribution network for the finished product has developed to serve the drug industry.”

Fast forward to 2023, that’s 25 years later, the illicit drug business is still of interest to many persons across the globe, and Nigerians are not left out of the interest in the fast money making  illicit DRUG deals. Hence, watching the not so new NDLEA, in the last 31 months, I have seen how constantly they keep reminding our society, institutions, parents and health care professionals, how important their desire to eliminate public access to psychotropics and opioids drug is.

It was foolhardy, for the drug baron to have thought he wouldn’t be caught, while committing a crime under a hotel with Heaven’s name! The arrest is indeed another memo the NDLEA is sending out to all of us. A reminder and a call to action for us to encourage one another and hands off any act that borders on cultivation, dealing, trafficking and use of illicit and dangerous drugs in Nigeria and as Nigerians.
Okogun, a public affairs analyst writes from Benin City, Edo State.