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National Geographic : 1982 Sep
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which covers only 5,383 square miles (about the size of Connecticut), and they pumped more than 600 million dollars into a perma nent population of only 210,000. The government is quick to point out that the average tourist is unlikely ever to en counter the drug problem. At worst, he might be walking down a crowded street in Nassau and be accosted, as I was one day, by a bebopping young man with a tape deck blaring into his ear, who tugged at my sleeve and showed me a handful of white powder and murmured, "Hey, man, you want to wake up your nose?" There will be no drug problem evident to the gambler in the busy casinos of Paradise Island or Cable Beach or to the shopper in the cosmopolitan arcades on Grand Baha ma. There will be no whispered overtures in the elegant drawing rooms of Lyford Cay Club on New Providence. And in the lovely, bucolic resorts of the Family Islands-once the Out Islands ("out" from Nassau) but re named by the government to impart a sense of community to this necklace of far-flung settlements-one's brain need be assaulted by nothing more hallucinogenic than a daz zling sunset. THE GOVERNMENT'S posture con tains an undertone of justified resent ment: It is not the Bahamas' fault that the U. S. has become the world's biggest market for illicit drugs; if the market were to dry up, so would piracy. The government claims, besides, that the problem has been exaggerated. "Anything can happen in a drug situation," Livingstone Coakley, then minister of tourism, told me, "but the inci dents that have occurred have been blown out of all proportion." Sadly, though, the handful of genuinely serious incidents has by now grown into a basketful, and if one crisscrosses the Baha mas by boat, as we did, few days go by with out some reminder that the buccaneering tradition is very much alive in the islands of the Spanish mariners' bajamar:shallow sea. It is a minor irony that such violence, which has held an almost honored place in the past 500 years of Bahamian history, was an imported commodity entirely. It was for eign to the aborigines, a placid and pacifist branch of the Arawak Indians who had fled 377
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