Their circumstances are hopeless and impoverished. They believe “Kush” will provide them relief, but the nirvana is transient and comes at a heavy cost.
In Sierra Leone, the recently legalised drug is horrendously spreading among the youth.
A 25-year-old garbage collector named Mohamed (name changed) smoked a joint laced with kush on the edge of a trash dump in the nation’s capital, Freetown.
He stated he would “meditate high meditation” for approximately an hour, then go to sleep, wake up, and eat.
And then quickly repeat the process once again.
“We smoke it the whole day,” he said.
“I spend a lot of money on it every day — around 200 leones,” or around $10: a small fortune in a country with average per capita income of under $500 a year.
The country in West Africa is one of the least developed in the world.
Nearby, in the centre of a slum where kids played among pigs and trash, Mohamed’s friends were jammed inside a shack enveloped in kush smoke.
- Distributed by gangs of criminals
The medicine was created synthetically, and it first appeared half a dozen years ago.
“The drug is an amalgamation of the various chemicals and plants that mimic the natural (cannabinoid) THC found in cannabis,” according to Abdul Sheku Kargbo, head of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency. Criminal gangs manufacture and distribute the substance.
The concentration of the active element can be “exponentially increased,” increasing potency, he claimed.
Ibrahim Hassan Koroma, the founder of the NGO known as the Mental Watch Advocacy Network, stated that “young people are dying.”
“To evaluate how young people are impacted by this drug usage, we need a quick and refocused plan. However, the situation right now is pretty alarming,” he continues.
Users of kush appear to be everywhere in Freetown, from the slums to affluent neighbourhoods, slumped with their heads hanging, and occasionally sleeping upright.
- Hellish Cycle
Kadiatu, 22, is among those who became hooked on the drug.
“Sometimes when I wake up from sleep without smoking, my body and joints ache,” she said.
“After I smoke two, three (joints), I feel okay, I feel alright, my meditation changes, my mood becomes cool. After smoking I eat a lot,” she said.
To pay for her hits, she resorts to sex work.
She bore scars from knife attacks and, she admitted, psychic wounds as well.
“I used to be a cheerful woman with so many fashion dresses,” she said. “(…) Look at the hair on my head — I don’t plait my hair (anymore).”
Koroma walked through the poor district of Crab Town, paying an outreach visit to a “hideout” where maybe a hundred kush users were inside, discreetly smoking joints.
The root cause of their addiction was poverty and neglect, he said.
“We don’t want to discriminate them or to point fingers at them, that’s stigmatization.
The only mental hospital in Sierra Leone, a refurbished building from the British colonial era, is overrun with young addicts who have been brought in by desperate families.
According to acting medical superintendent and resident psychiatrist Jusu Mattia, admissions to the hospital are 60% connected to kush.
- Lack of means and infrastructure
Numerous people were laying in beds at the drug misuse unit.
The facility “receives patients that are at the extreme end — they are intoxicated, or they are psychotic,” he claimed.
Care consists of a three to six-week period of isolation assisted by anti-psychotic medications to help individuals wean themselves from their addiction.
They can participate in social activities like sports and needlework as well as psychotherapy.
Student Michael Mannah, 22, claimed that his life has changed as a result of using kush for several years.
“I was the bad Michael, not the good Michael that I am now,” he said, speaking in one of the dormitories.
“I felt like I was in another world, different from this one,” he said.
“‘Abstain from kush’, it’s the best advice I have.”
Despite his jubilant demeanour, the facility lacks the staffing necessary to offer follow-up care, and relapses are frequent.
Due to its limited funding, a US NGO by the name of Partners in Help pays for medications, treatment courses, and staff training.
However, many kush addicts have no access to any kind of care; if they are not dangerous, they are just left alone to live like “zombies” without anyone to look after them, according to superintendent Mattia.
The hospital can only treat “the tip of an iceberg,” he said. “It’s a very big and widespread problem.”
