A synthetic drug ravages African youth

Desperate families have turned to a treatment centre that has resorted to chaining up some addicts

- KEMO CHAM

Kush users receive treatment at a medical outreach facility of Sierra Leone's Youth Development and Child Link, an NGO that provides medical care and psychological needs for drug users. Sierra Leone declared a war on the cheap synthetic drug, calling it an epidemic and a national threat.

In Sierra Leone, a cheap, synthetic drug is ravaging youth. Trashstrewn alleys are lined with boys and young men slumped in addiction. Health-care services are severely limited.

One frustrated community has set up what it calls a treatment centre, run by volunteers, but harsh measures can be used.

The project in the Bombay suburb of the capital, Freetown, started in the past year when a group of people tried to help a colleague’s younger brother off the drug called kush. After persuasion and threats failed, they locked him in his room for two months.

It worked. He has returned to university and thanked them for setting him free.

“The only time I left the room was when I went to the bathroom,” Christian Johnson, 21, recalled. He said he was motivated to kick the drug by thoughts of his family, the fear of becoming a dropout and the abandonment by many of his friends.

The volunteers then expanded the effort and took over an abandoned building. They seize people at families’ request and sometimes chain them to prevent them from escaping — an echo of a practice the West African country’s only psychiatric hospital previously used. There’s little padding against the concrete floor and walls, and little to do beyond confronting their craving.

“We turn parents away for lack of space,” said Suleiman Turay, a local football coach who helped launch the centre. “The people in the community co-operate and help in their own individual ways. Some bring food, some bring water, doing whatever they can to help.”