The heading of the article might raise a few eyebrows because no political party has ever held an event to market 'narcotics' in the country. So what are we talking about? To understand the gist of the matter, a newly emerging business models serves as an ideal example of how to sell products by emphasising on ideas. In fact, in this business model, marketers rarely talk about products. After all potential customers hate sales pitches.

In this particular model, there is the backend company which manufactures products, takes care of R&D, delivery of goods and payment processing. But the marketing is done by an independent marketing team. As said earlier, in this business model, the marketing methods are quite different from the way it’s done in the traditional model. In this model, marketers try to sell ideas to people using very sophisticated techniques. Products are mentioned very rarely. The real focus of the marketers is to get people hooked on to the ideas which will automatically lead people to purchasing products. For example, a marketer who wants to promote antioxidants doesn’t rush to tell the people to buy his ‘super’ product. But rather he offers people free goodies such as booklets, newsletters or e-books about degenerative diseases, free radicals...etc. In this way, the marketer gradually earns the trust of the customers and eventually gets customers to buy the products.

Marketing of narcotics in Maldives done by the political parties are more or less similar to the said business model. These marketers don’t talk about the various types of narcotics. They don’t even urge people to take drugs directly. The Islamists might even talk about its prohibition or shout slogans about 'fight against drugs'. However the irrationalism promoted these political parties is a catalyst for many youth to get hooked on to drugs. The drug addicts in the street can take care of the inventory, delivery, logistics and payment processing. This irrationalism demands that the people have short memories about the political party they support and continuously use divertive tactics in order to avoid the truth. Such a thinking pattern plus the huge intellectual vacuum in a society afflicted with external issues is a fertile ground for drug addiction

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