Recently, the wife of the Niger State governor, Dr Amina Abubakar Bello, decried the alarming rate of drug abuse among women and children in the north. She said that youths are increasingly getting involved in drug abuse to escape their present realities while women who are supposed to monitor their children were also getting involved….
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Recently, the wife of the Niger State governor, Dr Amina Abubakar Bello, decried the alarming rate of drug abuse among women and children in the north. She said that youths are increasingly getting involved in drug abuse to escape their present realities while women who are supposed to monitor their children were also getting involved. The governor’s wife said the problem was endemic in most homes in the north and pointed out that it was further compounded by the high level of unemployment in the country, closely followed by people’s inability to discuss addiction because it is viewed as a taboo.
Dr Bello urged the political leaders to take drastic steps to curb it. She lamented that the problem was creeping into the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps among people who are already traumatised.
Corroborating the governor’s wife’s apprehensions, managing director of a non-governmental organisation, Reconnect Health Development Initiative, also recently revealed that about 15 to 25 per cent of people in Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in the northern part of the country had become addicted to hard drugs.
We consider this a very disturbing development. Drugs consumption which used to be the preserve of criminals is now common among women and children. Some of the commonly abused drugs are cough syrups containing codeine, an opiate for treating pain. Others are tramadol and Rohypnol. Those who cannot go for these cough syrups or opioids, whose prices have skyrocketed as a result of increase in demand, go for other options including adhesive solution, lizard dung, inhalation of soak away pits and gutters for ammonia.
The rise in drug consumption in the north has been attributed to many factors—poverty, illiteracy, frustration and depression resulting from joblessness. It may also be convenient to attribute the rise in illicit drug consumption to poverty, illiteracy and joblessness but many children of the affluent who do not find themselves in those circumstances have been found to be deeply involved in the vice which has led some of them to be withdrawn from institutions of learning at home and abroad. To hide the shame, their parents often hold them at home in solitary confinement.
Some women, according to the NDLEA, take the drugs mostly containing codeine, in the erroneous belief that they would enhance their sex drive. Some of the immediate consequences of women’s involvement in this vice include divorce which in turn leads to children being raised in broken homes which exposes them to more vices. Some, it has been found, get involved in drugs due to religious and cultural pressures, social expectations and exerting demands of the society on them. They find drugs a convenient way to escape from the realities that hound them.
It is our view that society intervenes in this issue in a very decisive manner. There is the need to get to the root of the matter. Parents, in our view, must also be more vigilant over what their children do and bring them up properly.
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