Sunday morning I was driving up to Ladyville when I passed a brother hitching a ride, a little past Biltmore on the other side of the road. To these old eyes, he looked like someone I often see walking his dogs in Buttonwood Bay. Mistake. This brother came running for the ride, and it’s a stranger.
We’re driving for a little while before I say, you know I took you for somebody else. We chat a bit, then I bring up the gun laws. The brother understands. We make it safely to Ladyville. Bless up.
About twenty years ago, the Government of Belize passed a law which said that you are responsible for any of your passengers where drugs are concerned. The law which, I’m fairly sure, was forced down our Belizean throats by the Americans, meant that people like me stopped picking up hitchhikers. Sad. You pass poor people struggling with loads and needing a ride perhaps way out on the highways, you can’t do it, because you don’t know what’s in their knapsack.
The new drug law completely overturned the fundamental assumption of English common law, which is that you are innocent until proven guilty. The drug law they introduced here two decades ago essentially said, where drugs anywhere in your presence, your vicinity even, are concerned, you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent . Crazy.
I saw a man get five years just the other day for having a single shotgun cartridge in his pocket. A few days ago a man and two women got five years in jail because there were a couple guns in the attic of the house where they were found by police. I thought, perhaps in naivete, that the odds were high at least one of those women was innocent. Five years, just like that. Are guns and ammunition unavailable when youth want to murder youth in our streets? So then, are these stupid laws making any kind of difference?
Sunday morning I have this unknown brother in my vehicle. I can’t put him out. I mean, I can, but I won’t. Suppose the police have a checkpoint and this brother has a cartridge in his pocket. It’s curtains for both of us. Whose purpose is this serving? What it does, is make us Belizeans scared of each other. We can’t give each other a lift anywhere. On the matter of these draconian drug and gun laws, I am Dickens’ Beadle: The law is an ass.