Drug pills have spread to schools well beyond Colombo and into rural areas, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala said, announcing that a special programme has been launched to stop narcotics reaching schoolchildren.
The Minister was speaking at an event at Kobeygane National School in the Kurunegala District, NewsFirst reported. He gave no detail on what the programme involves, which agency runs it, or how many schools it covers.
Wijepala put the scale of the problem in custodial terms, saying around 70 per cent of inmates currently held in Sri Lankan prisons face drug-related charges.
The two figures do not fit together
The Minister also said approximately 40,000 inmates are in prison in connection with drug offences. That figure is very close to the size of the entire prison population, not a 70 per cent share of it.
Official Prisons Department figures reported in August put the total at 39,400 inmates as of 5 August — 28,702 unconvicted and 10,698 convicted — in a system designed for about 11,000. Seventy per cent of that population would be roughly 27,600, not 40,000.
Either the 40,000 refers to the total number held rather than the drug-related subset, or the prison population has risen sharply since August. NewsFirst did not flag the discrepancy, and no second outlet had carried the remarks at the time of writing.
Context
The claim lands in an established pattern. Drug cases account for 70 per cent of the Government Analyst’s Department’s workload, a bottleneck that keeps unconvicted suspects in remand and feeds the overcrowding behind this year’s prison unrest.
On schools, the Education Ministry last week banned alcohol and drugs at any event held under a school crest, naming Big Matches directly, and the National Cadet Corps has run a drug-prevention pilot for officers working with schoolchildren.
Not reported
NewsFirst did not name the special programme, give a start date or budget, say which districts it covers, or explain how the 70 per cent and 40,000 figures reconcile.
