How do we solve our drug problems?

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By Furera Bagel, PhD 

The other day I was at a pharmacy in my area trying to get some medicine when a man came in and started talking to the woman behind the counter. After they exchanged some familiarities that made me conclude that wasn’t the first meeting, he asked in Hausa if ‘that thing’ was available and she immediately sent a furtive glance my way. I stood right there waiting to be served.

After a small uncomfortable silence, she said, “It has finished.” 

Then he asked for Coflin, a cough syrup. She obliged, and he paid and left.

This incident left me in no doubt that the man was in that shop to purchase something illicit, possibly a drug since it was a pharmacy, and that was why he refused to mention it by name while I was there. 

I also concluded that the woman who owns the pharmacy with her husband were the regular suppliers, and that got me thinking of how many more people come to the same shop to purchase the same or other illicit drugs. I also figured the sheer number of other pharmacies in our town rendering similar services and wrecking the future of our youths.

It is very easy to get addicted to drugs. I found that quite by chance while I was studying for my PhD in Nairobi. It was at that period when one feels like throwing the towel and giving up. I was so depressed that I wasn’t able to sleep for three days, and every time I opened my computer to work, I had a severe headache. So, on that fateful Monday, because I had a deadline to meet my supervisor on Wednesday, so I went to the library to work when the headache started as soon as I began. I immediately closed my computer, packed my things, and headed to some friends’ house, which happened to be close to the university.

As soon as they opened the door I burst into tears, recounting my ordeals. They tried to calm me down and offered me food to eat since it was around 9 am. Afterwards, they offered me two pills and advised me to take one since I complained I was not able to sleep for days. They said I should keep the other one and only take it when I had the same trouble in the future.

I swallowed the pill and woke up around 5 pm to the voice of a friend, another Ph.D. student, also tearfully narrating her own ordeals. I couldn’t believe I was asleep for almost eight hours but I felt so good! I felt so at peace; there was no sign of headache, fatigue, or anything. In short, I felt reborn!

I asked my friends for the name of the medicine and they just looked at each other and said I should take the remaining one if I ever felt the need to. I went home, finished my corrections that night, and was able to meet up with my supervisor that week and all was good. But I made sure to go back again to beg them to give me more of that drug, not because I couldn’t sleep but because I loved the way it made me feel after I woke up from that long slumber. I just wanted to have that feeling again but they said, unfortunately, they had given me the last they got.

I kept that one pill with the hope that I would go to a pharmacy and show them. I was sure by looking at it they would be able to tell me what it was and if they had it so I would be able to purchase it. I later forgot about the pill since I couldn’t get it until recently when my cousin complained that a female colleague of hers was addicted to a certain drug. The woman, a respectful married Muslim, was addicted and could not function properly at work without taking the drug.

I asked her what kind of drug it was and when she described it I couldn’t stop myself from performing sujud-al-shukr to Allah for protecting me from drug addiction.

But what about those people that have become addicts? What can be done to salvage the situation that has become a phenomenon?

To some extent, drug abuse is directly connected to all the problems we are facing today from insecurity, insurgency, high rate of divorce, domestic violence, and the rest.

A 2018 BBC report on Tramadol indicated that there are many addicts even among the people in the North-eastern part of the country, including some of those responsible for fighting terror like the army and vigilante and even rescued young people who are trying to forget their predicaments.

Once when I went to report some drug abusers in my sister’s area who have turned an empty building into a den of drugs, an NDLEA official told me that they had traced a huge amount of the drugs to some religious leaders and their disciples, who use it for a night vigil in order to be able to finish some tasks given to them.

Sadly, not much is being done at the community level and by the government in order to curtail this evil, which is being smuggled into the country on a daily basis. Communities need to identify the selling points of those illicit drugs and take appropriate actions against them. The government needs to introduce serious punishment to abusers and a harsher sentence on the sellers, suppliers and smugglers.

This action must be taken in order to save our communities and the whole country from the effects of drug use like loss of productivity, unemployment, impairment in physical and mental ill-health among users, increased crime and deaths due to overdose, and other drug-related illnesses.

A drug-free Nigeria would be the first step to overcoming our challenges. A stitch in time saves nine.

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