Drugs: The deadly vice making silent rounds among students

A drug user injects himself with heroin, one of the expensive drugs on market. PHOTO by Faiswal Kasirye.

What you need to know:

Drug addiction. Following the death of Butaleja Woman MP Cerinah Nebanda and Amazing Race producer Jeff Rice, both cases attributed to drug abuse, word in the corridor was that drug abuse is wide in the country and is slowly spreading among secondary school students.

Peter Kanyike was in Primary Five when he tried smoking -by rolling a paper and lighting it by the charcoal stove.

He had seen several people in his Mengo-Kisenyi neighborhood puff away on cigarettes and other drugs and wondered “how it would feel like.”
Now a Senior Two student (school name withheld for fear of victimisation), Kanyike has become addicted to smoking.

“I usually get out of class in between the 45-minute lessons to go to the toilet and smoke. It does not matter what the weather is like or what time of the day it is,” Kanyike says.

He confesses that besides smoking cigarettes, he is also addicted to other illicit drugs.

Like Kanyike, Paul, a Kenyan student at a secondary school in Kawempe, a Kampala Division, admits to sneaking several drugs into the school, especially in the night. He shares the drugs with his friends.

The recent death of Butaleja Woman MP Cerinah Nebanda and former Amazing Race producer Jeff Rice - all linked to drug abuse, must have been an eye-opener of a bigger and often hidden problem of drug abuse in Uganda.

The availability of cheap drugs due to weak law enforcement and easy transit between Uganda and other countries is partly to blame for the vice.

Weak punishments
The police are, however, quick to defend themselves against abetting drug use, saying the problem is that several convicted drug traffickers get away with short sentences or fines that are not equal to the intensity of the problem.

“The problem isn’t about the enforcement. We arrest drug traffickers at Entebbe International Airport and produce them in court but before we even reach Kampala, they are released after paying their fines,” Vincent Ssekate, the police spokesperson, says.
The weak laws in Uganda, police say, have helped drug barons use the country as a transit point for drugs such as heroin from some Asian countries.

It is suspected that the drug barons use innocent Ugandans, especially students, as couriers. These are made to swallow the drugs packaged in pellets or carry them as luggage.
Indeed investigations by the Saturday Monitor show that drug use is common among students and youth.

School administrators are aware of the problem, although they say they have no way of solving it.

“The problem is turning out to be a very complicated phenomenon in that the students no longer take the drugs in their raw form. They are no longer taking the traditional ones,” the deputy head teacher of Kampala Secondary School, Mr Paul Bwaniki, says.

He added: “You may find a student chewing and you cannot tell whether they are chewing drugs. So the ignorance of the administrators is not doing us any good.”

He, however, says the drug problem is mainly faced by foreign students, especially those from Tanzania and Kenya, who “feel like they are out of prison” when they come to study in Uganda.
The problem has been heard in many school circles but the Ministry of Education officials say they cannot establish its magnitude because no student has been “caught red-handed.”

“We have heard this rumour but it is until we are investigating into a strike that you will hear reports that the students could have been influenced by drugs, Francis Agula, the commissioner for higher education, says.
The different forms and ways in which the drugs are packaged and the way the students carry them to school has added to the complexity with which the problem can be tracked.

“Many students are carrying alcohol in sachets and sometimes students pack the drugs in pillows, which has increasingly become difficult for school management to track the students down,” Mr Bamwiki said.

Ms Josephine Nakibuuka, the head teacher of Nabagereka Primary School located in Kisenyi, a Kampala slum, says because the school is located in a drug prone area, the school always uses their senior teachers to talk to the ‘mature’ pupils on the dangers of using drugs.

“You can never know what the pupils do when they get out of school. They could be taking drugs when they are out of the school fence so we need to constantly engage them on the issue,” Nakibuuka says.

In another case, Yasiin Omar, a local leader in Muyenga Parish, a Kampala suburb, described how six university girls were recently lured with little money to act as drug couriers to China.

“The girls were arrested in China and they are now facing a death sentence. The bad thing is that the drug barons flee after getting information that their couriers have been arrested. We suspect they are using other girls in these shoddy deals,” Omar says.
What is worrying security agencies more is that drugs that were once transported to European countries and China are now sold in Uganda to students and the working class.

Aware that many Ugandans cannot afford the cost of genuine hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine, the distributors adulterate these drugs by adding cheaper stimulants, with similar effects to the nervous system, to increase the weight and mass.

It is this concoction that they sell to the locals in both up market and low-cost pubs.

However, not all concoctions have been mixed well. Some are suspected to contain deadly chemicals that kill the drug addicts.

Although hard drugs are more problematic to the consumers’ health unlike simple drugs such as marijuana and khat, they have also caused damage to the country, especially among the youth.

The drugs are locally grown and are very accessible.
The police’s policy on fighting drugs is focusing on the source and the suppliers then deal with the consumers.

But efforts by the police to destroy marijuana gardens have always been futile due to shortage of manpower and weak enforcement.

Early this year, the Inspector General of Police, Lt. Gen. Kale Kayihura, disbanded an entire Anti-Narcotics Unit after receiving reports that they were allegedly conniving with drug lords to either kill cases or evade justice.

Police say the answer to the problem is the enactment of the Narcotics Drug and Psychotropic substances (control) Bill, 1999.

Edward Ochom, the police director of Research and Planning, says if the Bill is passed into law, the fight against drugs will be easier.

“The drug abusers will stay in jail for long sentences and therefore people will fear engaging in the illicit drug business,” Ochom says.
The heavy burden that drug use has inflicted on the community is visible to the country’s National Referral Mental Hospital at Butabika.

Senior consultant psychiatrist and the acting executive director of the hospital, Dr David Basangwa, explains that at least 20 per cent of all admissions to the hospital are alcohol and drug related.

If the trend in drug abuse continues as it is today, health experts fear it could become more difficult to deal with the vice in the future.
As Dr Basangwa explains, it is a time bomb that could explode anytime.

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Butabika, home of rich and poor drug addicts

At least 30 patients are currently admitted to Butabika Rehabilitation Unit for drug and alcohol abuse. Out of these, 20 per cent are girls.
According to a nurse, who asked not to be named, the hospital receives patients from different social and economic backgrounds.

This, according to her, remains a cross cutting problem affecting people from rich and influential families as well as those from poor families.

Hospital records indicate that out of the 750 patients admitted to the hospital, at least 180 to 200 are cases of drug and alcohol complications.
“We are getting fewer girls, not because few girls engage in the vice but we think because of the stigma associated with drug and alcohol abuse, girls prefer to deal with their problems silently unlike their male counterparts,” the acting executive director of Butabika hospital, Dr David Basangwa, says.

While the reasons why people take drugs may vary, the doctors at Butabika explain that from the well-to-do families, some of the patients say they take drugs for pleasure while others blame it on peer pressure.

“It’s a mix of people. You can’t point a finger because what happens is that the market is open and caters for all social classes. In terms of packaging, small sachets of as low as Shs100 are available on the open market. This allows anybody to take alcohol anytime,” Dr Basangwa says.

While drug use has become a public health problem in the country and at the global level, Dr Basangwa attributes the increase to weak laws and lack of enforcement.

“Community studies that have been done so far indicate that generally, 17.2 per cent of Ugandans abuse alcohol,” Dr Basangwa says.

Alcohol has continuously topped the list of the most abused brain-altering substances followed by cannabis, commonly known as marijuana.

Dr Basangwa says the habit is prevalent among secondary school students from Kampala and the surrounding districts of Wakiso and Mpigi.

“Some studies conducted in schools around Kampala indicated that 62 per cent of secondary school students admitted to using alcohol while 15 per cent use marijuana and another seven per cent says they used other addictive substances.”

At least 70 per cent of drug users are said to combine the intoxicants.
“They rarely use one, and the most commonly used are Marijuana, Mairungi and of recent we also get cases of heroin and cocaine,” Dr Basangwa says.