.jpeg)
Statement by Cllr. N. Oswald Tweh, Sr. Minister of Justice on the Occasion of International Drug Day
STATEMENT BY CLLR. N. OSWALD TWEH, SR., MINISTER OF JUSTICE AND ATTORNEY GENERAL, ON THE OCCASION OF INTERNATIONAL DRUG DAY
We have buried too many young people. We have walked past too many of our sons and daughters sitting catatonic on our streets, in our cemeteries, behind our markets, to pretend this is a problem we are merely observing. It is a problem we are living.
We know the name of what is killing us. It is called kush. It is cheap, it is everywhere, and it is engineered to be addictive. It does not discriminate between the child of a minister and the child of a market woman. It has filled our mortuaries faster than we can build new ones. It has turned promising young men and women into "zogos," sleeping in graveyards, abandoned by the very streets that once knew them as students, apprentices, footballers, sons, daughters. One in five (5) of our young people has now been touched by narcotics in some form. That is not a statistic. That is a generation.
President Boakai called this what it is: a national emergency. This Ministry, and every agency under it, takes that declaration seriously, and we are acting on it.
In the first three (3) months of this year alone, the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency seized over 422 kilograms of illegal narcotics and arrested 233 traffickers across this country. Just weeks ago, our officers at Roberts International Airport intercepted a cocaine shipment worth nineteen million United States dollars moving through our country toward other markets. Let that be a lesson to the cartels who think Liberia is an easy corridor: we are watching every port, every airstrip, every route. These are proof that when our security institutions are properly resourced, trained, and held accountable, they can win.
But seizures and arrests alone will not save us. We can lock up every street dealer in Liberia and the crisis will continue if we do not also dismantle the networks profiting at the top, and if we do not give our young people somewhere to go besides the drug den. The law must fall heaviest on those who manufacture, import, and traffic these poisons into our communities, the men in clean clothes and quiet houses who have never touched what they sell. It cannot fall only on the addicted teenager who needs treatment, not a prison cell.
This is the line this Ministry will hold. We will pursue traffickers and the corrupt officials who protect them without fear and without favor, in every county, at every border, at every port. At the same time, we will work with the Ministry of Health and our partners to expand treatment, because a nation that only punishes its addicted and never heals them will keep this crisis alive forever.
To the parents reading this: know the signs in your own house before they become signs in the street. To the teachers, the pastors, the imams, the elders, the chiefs: this fight needed your voice yesterday. To the young person who has already fallen into this, hear me clearly, we are not done with you, and you are not done with this country. There is a way back, and we are building the road for you to take it.
To those who profit from poisoning our youth, hear this as a warning and not a slogan: the Republic of Liberia is coming for you. Wherever you are, however well-connected you believe yourselves to be, the law will find you.
We did not survive a civil war, two epidemics, and decades of struggle to lose this generation to a drug peddled for a few hundred Liberian dollars on a street corner. Liberia has never lacked the will to fight for its survival. What this moment demands of us is that we fight for our children with the same resolve our forebears fought for this nation's independence and its peace.
On this National Drug Day, I am asking every Liberian, in government and out of it, in the city and upcountry, to make this fight personal. Report the drug den on your street. Support the young person trying to recover. Demand accountability from every official sworn to protect you. This Ministry will do its part. I am asking you to do yours.