Legal amendment to recover drug addicts’ money from dealers when they repent

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[size=52]Legal amendment to recover drug addicts’ money from dealers when they repent[/size]

[size=45]In a new step of its kind, the House of Representatives’ Anti-Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Committee announced that it is working on amending the Narcotics Law, by adding a paragraph to establish a fund to treat addicts, which will be financed by the amounts confiscated from drug dealers.
Committee Chairman Adnan Burhan Al-Jahishi said that “his committee is working on amending Law 50 of 2017, and is working diligently and with high professionalism so that the law is not born lame,” noting that “the law represents many axes, including the preventive aspect by considering the addict as a victim, and there is cooperation with the Judicial Council before amending the law, which is to send the addict and user to the clinic compulsorily if he is arrested by the authorities.”
Al-Jahishi explained that “the other axis is building clinics and rehabilitation centers affiliated with the Ministry of Health and preparing psychiatrists and specialized staff on how to treat addicts, in addition to an administrative axis that emerged after the meeting with the Director General of the Anti-Narcotics Department in the Ministry of Interior, by converting it into an agency instead of a general directorate, and converting the sub-committees in the governorates to be headed by governors instead of general directors in health, in addition to creating a fund to treat addicts financed by movable and immovable funds confiscated from dealers, in addition to the central budget, to support the agencies specialized in combating drugs, by purchasing examination devices, mechanisms and other requirements.”[/size]
[size=45]He stressed that the law has been read for the first time and will be read again soon, as a committee was formed from a number of committees such as health, environment, security and defense, in addition to the Anti-Narcotics Committee, to obtain the opinions of officials in the Judicial Council, the Ministry of Health, security agencies and other supporting agencies, to proceed with amending the law, noting that security operations that end with the arrest of dealers and those responsible for supplying this scourge to young people have begun to increase during this year, and the quantities confiscated are more than they were a year or two ago, which indicates that these operations are qualitative.
According to this amendment, drug addicts will recover their money from the dealers who stole money from addicts and drained them, but the money will be returned in the form of treatment that will rid them of their addiction and open a new opportunity for them in life.
In recent years, drug trafficking and abuse have increased in Iraq, especially in the south and center of the country, which has become a major route for smuggling and trafficking, despite the security forces’ recent intensification of their operations in pursuing drug dealers and announcing almost daily the seizure of quantities of drugs and the arrest of many smugglers.
Iraq was considered, under the former regime before 2003, a transit point for drugs manufactured in Iran or Afghanistan heading to Europe, but drug consumption has increased significantly in recent years.
The most common type of drug in Iraq is methamphetamine or crystal, which generally comes from Afghanistan or Iran.
There is also Captagon, an amphetamine that is produced on an industrial scale in Syria before crossing the border into Iraq and flooding the markets of the wealthy Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, which is the main consumer market in the Middle East.
Iraqi security forces currently announce almost daily raids and arrests related to drugs, but this is still not enough to curb the phenomenon.
Inas Karim, head of the “Drug-Free Iraq” Foundation, says that “the security operations carried out by the Ministry of Interior are important and necessary compared to previous years, which did not witness control over drug trafficking networks, but this alone is not enough.” Karim
adds that “Iraq today needs to control its borders with neighboring countries, where large quantities of drugs enter, in addition to the need to provide advanced devices to detect drugs.”
For Karim, a psychologist described by local media as the first Iraqi woman to establish an addiction treatment organization, the measure of the authorities’ success in confronting the spread of drugs lies not in the number of arrests, but in the number of addicts.
“We do not measure it by the number of networks we arrest, but by the number of their victims among the addicts who our center receives,”
she says. “For example, as an addiction treatment center, during the first half of this year we received nearly 700 cases, including 45 girls, which is a very large number compared to last year, which saw the reception of about 820 addiction cases.[/size]
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