International Day Against Drug Abuse & Illicit Trafficking |26 June 2017
A message of hope
The chairperson of the Committee for Awareness, Resilience and Education (Care) against substance abuse, Sarah Zarqani Rene, has said that we need to move from despair to hope in the fight against drugs.
“As we commemorate the international day against drug abuse and illicit trafficking, and the harsh reality of the drug pandemic, which is a serious and real threat to our national security and survival of our small paradise nation, we need to move from despair to hope,” says Mts Zarqani Rene in her message for the occasion.
The full text of the message reads:
“My message today is one of hope. It is said that it is in the deepest despair that greatest hope is born. Hope is only born out of clear vision and the sense of the means to make progress towards it. Hope is both an individual feeling as well as a shared creation between people. Let those with hope resist indifference. Let us all come together therefore to fight this scourge together. Let us build a collective vision and common meaning of life.
“We need to tackle the issue of drugs head on. There is no time to linger, to stall, to remain indifferent, and to remain silent, because every minute the situation gets worse with age of initiation into drugs constantly getting lower and lower. In ten years from now if this present trend is left to continue we would be crying tears of blood.
“The task is simple. If we acknowledge that this the most important problem facing our nation it needs to take first place on the agenda of all forums from highest to the lowest. The problem has gone too far for our efforts to be mediocre or halfhearted. We need to go for zero tolerance against all drugs and bar no efforts to make this happen. The normalisation of a drug culture in any society is the beginning of the end and for a small nation like ours, whose population is not far from the size of a packed football stadium, the urgency is great.
“Let us have a clear vision for our society and let that vision be one that empowers our children and youth to make positive healthy life choices towards a drug free life, to aspire to excellence, hard work, discipline and resilience against negative life forces and acquire spiritual moral, emotional social and competence which are the key to helping them to being happy, staying safe, having goals and dreams and striving to attain them. Let it be one that makes our families places of love and nurture and our parents understand the value of their God-given responsibility of child rearing. The priority is to capture the ultimate meaning of life and its fundamental values, to educate the moral conscience, which makes every human being capable of judging and of discerning the proper way to achieve self-realisation according to his /her original truth.
“In the darkness of the so many things going wrong, we sometimes forget that there are great things happening - our collective human assets, community strength, that will give us hope to move from our despair. This gives us a whole lot of reasons to hope for a better today and tomorrow for our children.
“Here is an extract from a group of Praslin secondary students during a Care activity last week:
‘Last night I matched every star in the sky with a reason why I love this paradise. Looking down from those stars, you could be forgiven for thinking that you have unearthed some lost world - some hidden treasure untouched by human - a paradise lost. However there is a threat to our island – one which must be confronted if we are to save our way of life. Drugs! We must unite to fight the catastrophic effects of drug use and addiction to protect ourselves and our future generations….’”