Experts suggest ways to combat drug trafficking

RIYADH: Prominent and top educators described drugs and terrorism as two sides of the same coin. Drugs are being smuggled into Arab countries in order to weaken their structure and the demolition of their security, they said.
They said this at an event organized by Naif Arab University. Top professors and officials in the Arab world, including Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sanad, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Haia) and Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Shaer, undersecretary of Naif Arab University for Security Sciences, took part in the event.
The event was attended by 80 Arab experts, Arab, international non-governmental organizations, criminal justice agencies, security sectors, in addition to faculties of law and rights groups from 14 Arab countries — Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Algeria, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Mauritania and Qatar.
In his speech, Al-Shaer said that the forum comes as part of the university’s responsibility in its fight against drugs — which is one of the most serious crimes facing the world.
He said, drug lords are targeting the youth which has prompted the international community to fight it in all its forms at all levels, and to search for the most effective techniques to combat it.
He said the seriousness of the crime from others is that those drug lords sit atop highly complex organizations, and there is vast networking on the regional and international scale.
In his speech Al-Sanad reaffirmed the gravity of drugs and the close association with deviant groups. He said that terrorism and drugs are two sides of the same coin, and that terrorism is fed stray ideas and funds drug networks, either in selling or promoting them.
He noted that the facts and statistics have shown that the financing of acts of terrorism and organizations are through the drug trade, as well as the recruitment of young people with stray and deviant ideas.