Minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Sandra Husbands.
A call has been made for greater support to be given to the National Council on Substance Abuse (NCSA) for the work it has been doing with the youth of Barbados who need key interventions and the work to come, as changes are made to a key piece of legislation.
The call came recently from Minister in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Sandra Husbands, as she made her contribution to the Drug Abuse (Prevention and Control)(Amendment) Bill, 2020 recently.
“I recognize that as a society we have a really long way to go and we need to give all the necessary support to our schools, to our parents and to the National Council on Substance Abuse. And I just want to commend one particular programme that they have that has worked very well, but it’s too small to have the broad-based national impact that we would like it to have and this is the project called Project SOFT,” Husbands said.
“Project SOFT is a programme that targets children who are moving from primary school into secondary school. Why? Because we know in the secondary arena, children are brought under more peer pressure, they might be introduced to drugs if they have not already been introduced at the primary level and this is the area where they are most vulnerable, as they’re trying to shape and make decisions about who they are where they’re going and what they want to do. This is the time that they want to fit in,” Husbands continued.
She added, “Every year, the National Council on Substance Abuse used to have a camp for forty children and they would go do a residential camp in which children would be exposed to decision-making, how to make friends. They would not only talk about drugs and the abuse of drugs etc., but how to manage the whole transition from their primary education setting into that secondary education setting and it was something that when I was Chairman, I really wanted to us to be able to offer this to all children in that transition corridor, when they’re making that jump from primary to secondary and so it is a programme that I would want to commend to us as a country. It is one that I think that if we were to use it as a starting point, it would help us in working with our young people, to be able to make the necessary choices”.
Minister Husbands went on to state that one of the reasons why NCSA would have found this absolutely necessary, is because of the reality of what is happening in our society, drug wise.
“In their reports, they found that a lot of the young people who needed to do drug counselling, needed drug counselling around marijuana and most of them were 15 years of age. And when they examined the reasons why these 15 year olds found themselves in the situation of the use of marijuana, it was because they came from families where there was the use and abuse of illegal substances,” Husbands noted.
As such, she suggested that such programmes and the work of the NCSA in general, in terms of the training it offers to youngsters will be key going forward, given that the Bill being introduced seeks to provide for the payment of a fixed penalty for persons found in possession of small quantities of cannabis.
