THERE WAS A TIME?when the more brazen visitors to our shores were satisfied with the sun, sea, sand and sex. Their raunchiness merely turned heads, and some beachcombers and vendors were better off for it in the end.
Officialdom virtually turned a blind eye to the seashore liaisons; touted foreign exchange may have been an incentive.
And over the years, introductions and relationships and their survival have had greater touches of sophistication, thanks to the Internet. Greetings and salutations, sweet nothings and expressed passions have been only a fingertip from commencement and sustenance.
Such would not have been too great a concern to most other Barbadians, and hardly a bother to the powers that be.
Not so with the burning desire of the even more adventurous visitor hellbent on breaking our narcotic laws.
Never before has an Internet website so brazenly involved the good name of Barbados in so dastardly dangerous and unlawful an act: peddling for all the world to see illegal drugs online.
Masterminded, it seems, by a “Canadian” who claims to have “lived in Barbados all his life”, the website – webehigh.com – in mockery of our police tells how to avoid arrest, at what points on the island one may pick up one’s weed, how to tell the quality, and just who might advise you – among other things.
The illegal drug site speaks with such insolence of our police and community protectors that nothing less than its being shut down would suffice.
That our police “don’t trouble tourists”; and that if you do run into them, “just be nice . . . . 90 per cent of the time they have a relative or friend that does smoke. I have heard you can bribe . . .” is nothing short of contemptuous of our law officers and an affront to law-abiding Barbadians.
Clearly, illegal drug use isn’t going away, if what Mr Canadian says is true: that there are “some good places to get marijuana from on the South Coast”; that the “best place” to get weed is on the East Coast.
It cannot be in our best interests, healthwise or tourism-related, that a Britisher could be endorsing www.webehigh.com, the “fantastic site” that gives you the lowdown on marijuana purchase and use in Barbados.
If the coming to light of this nefarious website does not start alarm bells ringing, we don’t know what will.
