Shillong, Apr 8: Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma said today that the state government is working hard for the ‘drug-free’ Meghalaya.
Conrad Sangma said that, though the number of arrests have gone up and the number of drug users has gone down, he is still not happy with the results because the government wants to make Meghalaya a complete ‘drug-free’ state.
“The number of users has gone down. I am not happy with that kind of result. There is much more to be done. We want to be completely drug-free. We are looking at it as a war against drugs. So we will have to work much harder,” Sangma told reporters.
“We have seen the frequency of supply is going up and that is why more and more people are caught and the police have a very strong intelligence network. Overall we are seeing things improving but there is a long way to go and there are lots of challenges we are facing,” he added.
Also read | Meghalaya Govt Says It’s Ready For ILP, Awaits Centre’s Green Light
Stating that a lot of investment was made in the past, Sangma said the government has formed a dedicated Task Force, which is working aggressively to target the supply chain.
The chief minister has postponed the meeting of the Drug Reduction Elimination & Action Mission (DREAM) scheduled to be held today and said, “Likely, the meeting will be held after Easter.”
“There is a supply network that has to be targeted and there are users that need to be rehabilitated and counselled – so all these require multiple interventions and this DREAM is what enables us to bring all this together.”
Referring to Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s call for a concerted effort of all states to deal with the issue, Sangma said, “The entire call by the Assam CM is absolutely correct. We all need to work together as there is intel connected with different states that need to be coordinated and all that is happening and it will happen in a well-coordinated manner in the future.”
Also read | BSF Nabs 4 Bangladeshis, Indian Tout Near Meghalaya Border
“It is for the first time there is a strong and coordinated effort by the central government, state governments and region as a whole the coordination that is taking place to fight against this entire menace of drugs and I can tell you this is yielding huge results because the number of cases which you are saying of people being caught have gone up,” he stated.
(Newmai News Network)