Drug use among teenagers in Lithuania exceeds the national security threshold, Kęstutis Budrys, adviser to President Gitanas Nausėda, has said.
“We have to re-categorise the problem here. [...] It is not just a national problem, we can already say that it now exceeds the national security threshold, and we must view it as such,” Budrys told reporters on Monday.
“When we deal with national security issues, we do not only use teddy bears, drawing competitions, or any kind of campaigns, but we also use harsher measures, and from now on we should treat them absolutely as an unavoidable necessity,” he said, adding that right now “the state has no control over this problem”.
According to Budrys, decades of prevention programs and campaigns are not working.
“Either we are not doing what needs to be done, or we are imitating what needs to be done,” Budrys said.
According to police data, 150 cases of minors committing criminal offences related to the disposal and smuggling of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances were registered in Lithuania last year. In the first eight months of this year, 75 such cases were registered.
Last week, a 17-year-old died in Lithuania’s southern city of Marijampolė after a suspected overdose, while several other young people needed medical treatment for drug poisoning.
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