Advanced Drug Enforcement Seminar

Published February 14, 2016

Our first AFRICOM funded course, set the ball rolling for the month of February.

The course was delivered by experienced agents who retired from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and one of our favorite instructors- Griz- was back at the RTC! It was a class made up of outstanding students with years of experience that was made evident during their practical exercise. We had some returning students who had previously attended the Basic Drug Enforcement Seminar last year, so we’d like to catch up on what they’ve been up to and hear their take on this course as well.

U.S. Ambassador to Ghana- Ambassador Jackson, addressing the class

RTC Delegate Coordinator: Hello guys, Tell me, what have you been up to since you attending the Basic Drug Seminar? How have you applied the skills and knowledge gained at the RTC?

RTC Alumni: We’ll we’ve been fighting crime (Collective laughter)! Really, we use the skills learnt on a day-to-day basis, in our investigations and the course really expanded our knowledge base on a lot of things. We have worked on important cases within the past months that have been successful for us.

RTC Delegate Coordinator: After 5 days of the Advanced Seminar, do you feel that you have learned new things?

RTC Alumni: Yes, of course! This week, we have built on what we already knew and the instructors were awesome and came with valuable years of experience! For starters this course was more intense and we went through a lot of topics in a short period of time. We especially appreciated the fact that this course was more practical, with more hands-on case studies and fruitful debates. We enjoyed the session on Controlled Delivery and we wish we could have had a practical on it! Gordon’s practical was really interesting and we loved the role playing! All participants also brought new experiences and with more countries came more expertise! The practical experiences tend to stay with us and give us an idea of what is done on the ground. We hope to see more of those in future courses!

Cross section of participants

RTC Delegate Coordinator: Sounds like you had a good week! If you would like to attend future trainings at the RTC, which topics would interest you the most?

RTC Alumni: We wish we could come back for every course because you have so many relevant courses at the RTC! We especially would like to see more Money Laundering courses and a course on Strategic Leadership for Law Enforcement (SMLE anyone?). Another new issue we are faced with now is Narco-Terrorism so we would like to be trained on that.

Participants working through a practical exercise

It was a pleasure to meet all our new participants and instructors as well as our returning participants from Ghana, Kenya, Burkina Faso and Guinea. We hope to have you all back soon. Do keep in touch with the RTC!