Cannabis and Bangladesh

Bangladesh has been in the news recently for its crackdown on drugs with a significant number of people having been shot and killed by law enforcement. This government action has brought the attention of human rights groups around the world.

Bangladesh, a small country with a huge population, surrounded on all sides by other Asian countries, surely forms a part of the drug movement route between international borders. Its proximity to India, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the countries of East Asia mean that heroin and methamphetamine flow easily into Bangladesh.  This means that there are a significant number of users of heroin, methamphetamine and pharmaceutical drug abusers besides the users of the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco within Bangladesh. Government measures of trying to use force to reduce the drug usage is something that no country has ever succeeded in. In fact, the war on drugs has been universally recognized as a failure, the most evident example being the US which initiated and funded the war world wide all these years. For Bangladesh, a country already vastly stressed by overpopulation, diminishing agricultural land and the effects of climate change, the way to approach this needs to be more realistic.

Cannabis, which  has been a part of the Bangladesh people's culture and tradition for thousands of years, needs to be re-introduced back into the mainstream way of life. Anybody who thinks recreation is not one of the most important necessities of human society is living in a bubble. Cannabis growth will provide agriculture with a additional crop that is better suited to handle the vagaries of climate change.  It is an ideal crop for the small farmer. It will provide new environment friendly industries with hundreds of industrial applications of cannabis. It will provide jobs. It will provide the people of Bangladesh with a healthy, safe medicinal and recreational alternative to the vast amounts of harmful pharmaceutical drugs, heroin, novel psychotropic substances, methamphetamine, synthetic cannabis, tobacco and alcohol that are surely being pumped into the country and through it. If indigenous varieties of cannabis can be documented, researched and revived, this can form an additional valuable commodity for trade, industry, agriculture, medicine, business, tourism and the economy in Bangladesh.

Overall, the introduction of legal recreational cannabis for social usage is the ideal medicine for a country stressed with overpopulation and climate change damage, a medicine that will calm the nerves of the people and help them to think creatively and inventively towards sustainability. It will also help the government to think more wisely and make much more effective decisions that have the people in mind. 

In December 2020,  the UN voted to remove cannabis from its most restricted Schedule IV category of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It does however still remain in Schedule I, which is the least restrictive. This one move by the UN itself should be sufficient to bring about the recreational legalization of cannabis in every nation and an overhaul of national drug laws. 

 

It must be noted that in most places where cannabis legalization has happened it took the efforts of the people who mobilized themselves through grassroots level movements to bring about this change. Left to lawmakers legalization would have been impossible, as the main interests of lawmakers concern the protection of the big industries opposed to cannabis such as pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, medical, alcohol and tobacco. For something that truly benefits the people, the people themselves have had to make the change.

Listed below are articles taken from various media related to the above subject. Words in italics are the thoughts of your truly at the time of reading the article.    


'Bangladesh is the newest frontline in state-backed drug crackdowns in Asia, and Islam is one of more than 200 people shot dead by police in Bangladesh since May, when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced the campaign'
https://in.reuters.com/article/bangladesh-drugs-killings/feature-arrested-and-killed-inside-the-bangladesh-prime-ministers-war-on-drugs-idINL1N1UU09E


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