Head of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), retired Brig. Gen. Buba Marwa has warned that legalizing cannabis in Nigeria will add to the current security challenges the country is currently battling and may further worsen the situation. Buba Marwa who made this statement at a national security summit organized by the House of Representatives added that over 10million Nigerians are abusing cannabis and that there is a strong nexus between drug abuse and insecurity.
According to the NDLEA Boss “Presently, there is no bigger national issue than that of insecurity. It is one of the big challenges, if not the biggest, threatening our dear country. Insecurity is today a full-blown malady with many manifestations such as insurgency, banditry, kidnapping, murder, robbery, reprisal killing, name it. Yet there has never been a government that is more committed to ending this spate of insecurity than the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. The persistence of the problem has forced on us the necessity to start to look at likely extraneous factors that might be sustaining the resistance from the criminal elements and in doing so, try to connect the dots.
“The permutations will lead to a list of probable causes, which will not exclude the use and abuse of illicit substances. In the final analysis, drug abuse is indeed one of the factors fueling insecurity. The relationship between substance abuse and crime is a fact. What is clear is that no sane human being will rise against society to commit the kind of gross atrocities we are witnessing in recent years, except such an individual has first hardened his heart with mind-altering substances. The use of drugs for perverted purposes is not a new phenomenon, neither is it something that just started in Nigeria. There are precedents in world history,” the agency’s boss stated.
While warning about the legalization of cannabis, the NDLEA boss added “Should we have such a law, we will soon become a nation of junkies and criminals. As such, I caution that our lawmakers should not legalize cannabis because it will amount to taking a step forward and ten steps backward. It will no doubt rob the nation of recent gains in the war against illicit drugs.”
