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Criminals or victims? How men entangle women in drug trade
View(s):Women engaged in the drug trade are mostly traffickers rather than users and are pushed into that dark world by their husbands or partners, according to drug control officials who say the need for rehabilitation resources is urgent, with lonely women who come to Colombo looking for work the most at risk.
Their perilous situation was highlighted this week with news that a woman – who investigations by the Sunday Times found was a heroin pusher – is among the criminals facing the death penalty. Police sources said the woman, Chamali Perera from Colombo 15, had been arrested twice – once while out on bail for the first offence – for selling heroin.
“First the man starts taking drugs, then eventually the women are introduced to this alien substance,” National Dangerous Drug Control Board (NDDCB) Chairman Professor Saman Abeysinghe said. It is usually husbands who drew women into the drug trade, National Committee on Women Chairperson Swarna Sumanasekara concurs, citing easy money coming from trafficking. “Getting them out of it will be a difficult task,” she said.
The rehabilitation centre for women at Talangama, receives around 35-40 patients every year, who receive counselling and vocational training.
“Many of these women are not from Colombo, they come to Colombo from far off places and land a temporary job in the city. They get involved with individuals who use drugs and eventually get used to the idea of using drugs on a daily basis,” NDDCB’s Assistant Director of Outreach, W. Marasinghe said.
Only 20-30 women drug addicts were rehabilitated each year, Professor Abeysinghe said. “We are expecting to expand facilities in order to cater to at least 30,000 women because there is a need to rehabilitate that many,” he said. Women were more engaged in trafficking than consuming drugs, a senior police official who declined to be identified said. “Many women were caught selling drugs in the streets and some of them were caught while engaging in deals,” he said.
He said women were sometimes used to smuggle drugs into prisons, often for their husbands. “Women are not easily suspected, so the chances of escaping detection are very high,” he said. He said a problem often faced by police on raids was that women hid drugs in their clothing and reacted violently to attempts to search them, falsely accusing police officers of sexual harassment.
The NDDCB’s Director of Research, Bhadrani Senanayake, described how tragedy deepens for women who become addicts. Because the cost of drugs is high the women are forced into prostitution to earn money to buy them, she said. “This profession provides an income of somewhere close to Rs. 60,000 and the whole amount is spent on buying drugs, as a result of which they become addicted to both the profession and the use of drugs,” Ms. Senanayake said.
“Women are more violent and aggressive when they consume drugs,” she added, underlining the fact that drug use has a greater mental impact on women. The violence has social consequences, not the least in the fact that drug-taking parents took little interest in bringing up their children.
Ms. Senanayake, like other officials, said women did not voluntarily use or sell drugs but were led into it by others. The habit began with cigarette-smoking, from which they were tempted into trying substances such as heroin and cocaine.
The chances of rehabilitation are few, due not only to the lack of facilities highlighted by Professor Abeysinghe but also because many women refuse to enter rehabilitation centres. “The reason is that many of the women are reluctant to leave their kids behind”, the NDDCB’s Mr. Marasinghe said.