Two Saint Lucians fined in St Vincent after cannabis found in barrel at port

Two Saint Lucians have been fined after police in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines found a large quantity of cannabis and hashish hidden inside a shipping barrel that had been delivered to a house near the capital. Kerry Edwards and McGavin Willie, both 31, were sentenced at the Serious Offences Court and ordered to pay EC$32,660 each, as reported by St. Lucia Times.

The pair were convicted of three charges each: having a controlled drug in their possession with the intention of passing it on to others, trafficking in a controlled drug, and bringing a controlled drug into the country. The case against them rested on 20,974 grammes of cannabis resin together with a further 3,632 grammes of cannabis, quantities that officers said were in the men's possession when the property was searched.

The operation that led to the court case began at New Kingstown Port, where Vincentian officers had taken up positions to keep watch over a blue barrel that had arrived by sea. When a truck collected the barrel and carried it to a home in Arnos Vale, officers trailed it and noted where it was delivered. A search warrant was then obtained and the property was surrounded.

Inside the house, police reportedly came across Edwards and Willie in the kitchen, taking items out of the barrel and setting them on the floor. A closer look at the barrel revealed sealed parcels tucked inside cereal boxes, some holding cannabis and others hashish. In total, officers counted 77 parcels of hashish hidden among the contents, wedged into peanut butter jars, folded into bedsheets, packed in cereal boxes and concealed in a mop box.

Questioned by officers, the two men are said to have explained that they were in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on holiday, knew nothing about any drugs, and had simply been asked by the person who sent the barrel to unpack and sort through what was inside. Records showed that both had arrived in the country on October 8, little more than a week before the court hearing. The court made clear that if the fines are not paid, each man will serve three years in prison.

For readers who follow the region, the case is a reminder of how closely police across the Eastern Caribbean watch cargo moving between the islands. Saint Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines are neighbours in the Windward chain, share the Eastern Caribbean dollar as their currency, and are linked by the same regional sea and air networks that carry both goods and visitors. That shared currency, pegged at EC$2.70 to the US dollar since 1976, is one of the practical ties that make multi-island trips straightforward for Britons combining the two destinations.

The news has no bearing on the day-to-day experience of the many British visitors who take holidays to St Lucia each year, but it does illustrate how seriously regional courts treat drug offences, whatever the country where the arrest happens. Questions about whether is St Lucia safe for visitors are best answered by the island's long-established tourism industry, which operates normally and welcomes hundreds of thousands of guests annually, while law enforcement across the OECS states continues to pursue trafficking cases of exactly this kind.

Regional links matter to the trade as well as to holidaymakers. Barbados remains the simplest partner island for Saint Lucia because of its air links, and British Airways has in the past sold twin-stop tickets from Gatwick serving Saint Lucia and Grenada on the same booking, while Virgin Atlantic has connected Grenada and St Vincent and the Grenadines through Barbados. Inter-island ferries and small aircraft move freely between the Windward Islands, which is precisely the network the barrel in this case travelled on.

Scheduled flights to St Lucia from the UK land at Hewanorra International Airport in the south of the island, and visitor arrivals continue to grow across the region's airports and cruise ports. The economy of Saint Lucia depends heavily on that flow of visitors, which is why governments across the OECS have been keen to show that regional security cooperation protects the legitimate trade in people and goods between the islands.

For anyone weighing when to travel, the best time to visit St Lucia is generally December to April, when the island sits outside the Atlantic hurricane season's peak months, and the same seasonal pattern applies across the Windward chain, including St Vincent and the Grenadines. Cruise passengers will also find that St Lucia cruises call at Pointe Seraphine and La Place Carenage near Castries, keeping the two neighbours firmly connected on southern Caribbean itineraries.

Accommodation across the island ranges from small guesthouses to well-known hotels in St Lucia such as those around Rodney Bay and the Pitons, and the tourism sector continues to operate unaffected by this case, which concerns two individuals and a single criminal matter in a neighbouring jurisdiction.

What happens next rests with the two men: unless the EC$32,660 fines are settled, Edwards and Willie face three years in a Vincentian prison. The case was reported in Kingstown earlier this month, and any further developments will come through the courts in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.