Corporate Bodies Charged To Support Rehabilitation Centres

Mr Logosu Amegashie, Head of Addictive Diseases Unit, Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, has called on corporate bodies, as part of their social responsibilities, to support the existing rehabilitation centres and help bring relief to people in need.

He urged them to consider building new rehabilitation centres in all the 10 regions of the country.

He said there are few rehabilitation centres in the country and these are even ill equipped, hence, the efforts of corporate entities would be needed to support the existing ones so as to treat and rehabilitate drug addicts.

Mr Amegashie made the appeal in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on the sidelines of a forum organised by the West Africa Drug Policy Network and West Africa Civil Society Institute, to mark the World Drugs Day Celebration.

The spotlight of the forum, dubbed: ' Support Don't Punish Activities 2018'; was that governments all over the world would need to begin to focus more on health, development, security and the human rights of people who use drugs.

Mr Amegashie said among the major challenges was that majority of existing rehabilitation centres were not owned by government.

He said they were, however, expecting government to partner the private sector to equip them in delivering health care.

'Government must stop pretending, as if drug addiction does not exist. We should be interested in that regard because it affects every aspect of our lives," he said.

He called on government to build more rehabilitation centres across most parts of the country.

Mr Amegashie told GNA that decriminalising the use of marijuana as a policy would mean it had been legalised; which was not acceptable.

However, he said, the argument could be that people who were found using drugs should be given an option of treatment, as it was done elsewhere.

Mrs Maria-Goretti Ane, Consultant for Africa International Drug Policy Consortium, said over the years, as a country the focus was more on prohibition; which means much was spent on supply reduction strategies, yet the strategies were not funded.

She said they were advocating that this year government would begin to focus more on harm reduction strategies, demand reduction strategies and the health of the individual should be paramount to all that.

She said the inability to implement some of these initiatives was because of the law; adding that 'if you look at the PNDC law 236, the focus is imprisonment; if am caught with one roll of marijuana, I will be jailed for not less than five years".

Mrs Ane said the law in itself was the impediment stating that "until we changed the laws, make reviews of it and make some kind of improvement upon it, to put in all these advocacy suggestions that civil society was putting across, we would not make head way".