Egypt’s big enemy —the drug pedlar

Press, 19 December 1985, Page 42

Egypt’s big enemy —the drug pedlar

By AHMED LUTFI of Agence France-Presse Cairo

His corpulent body swathed in an ample Jellabah, puffing, lazily on his hookah, he doesn’t look too menacing. Yet this is the image of Egypt’s public enemy No. 1 — the drug pedlar. The television message is stern: “This is your principal enemy. He sells you a mirage. But what you buy is destruction.” The television sequence, repeated often, shows a puny little man, the drug -addict, begging the pedlar humbly for his fix, the key to the door into an artificial and fleeting paradise. The traditional image of the witty hashish smoker, a man much in demand for his social repartee, is way out of date. His hashish has made way for new stimulants — heroin or cocaine. Artists take the “white poison” — as it is called in the current flood of news media warnings — as a spur for creativity. Businessmen

take it to relax after a hard day at the office. Students use it as a rite of initiation into adulthood. The young men treat it as the so-called “doorway to virility,” young women as a sign of their independence. The hard drugs are spreading among children in S’vate schools, who also e amphetamines. The news media message goes on, incessantly: “Your turn will come. Tomorrow you may discover that your son is on drugs.” Recently a Port Said court pronounced its first drug-related death sentence — against two murderers who acted under the influence of hard drugs. The Interior Minister, Mr Rushdi, has proposed the death penalty for drug dealers. He has also urged that the state of emergency, introduced after the killing of President Sadat in 1981, be extended to include them.

This would give the authorities free rein to lock up anyone suspected of

dealing in drugs. Many Egyptians believe that drugs represent a deliberate attempt to sap the moral fibre of the country. From here it is just a short step to believing that foreign powers are waging a new version of the opium wars.

As one senior Government official put it recently: “The drug battle is a matter of life and death for Egypt. We are facing an international plan aimed at destroying Egypt socially, morally and economically.” Drug sales in Egypt for the year 1983/84 are said to have totalled 3U52.84 (?4.94) billion.

But the news media, who call this ruinous for the economy, have little to say on the exact nature of the drug network and the highlevel complicity that must make it possible to extend its tentacles into all levels of Egyptian society. All Egypt is mobilised against an enemy billed as implacable, cruel and, most importantly, mysterious.