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By Bolaji Okunola
The National Drug and Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has admonished students and staff of Hallmark University, Ogun State, to stay away from drug abuse. The admonition was contained in a lecture tagged: ‘War Against Drug Abuse’.
The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Segun Odunola, in his welcome address, said the aim of the lecture was to prevent the misuse of drugs in the institution and Nigeria at large. The Deputy Superintendent of Narcotics, Bamishaye Loveth, who led the sensitization visit, spoke on drug prevention, treatment, and care.’ She defined drugs as substances legally or illegally taken into the body with the aim of affecting the central nervous system by acting on the brain and spinal cord. According to her, drugs have the potential to cure diseases and affect the normal functioning of the body and brain.
She put the figure of people involved in illicit drugs at over 255 million people with the range of 162 to 329 million worldwide in 2015. The majority of these individuals, she explained, were from West African countries while 14 million are Nigerians.
“Over 225 million people have issues with drugs and not all of them have problematic syndrome. This is not to encourage us that there’s no problem with abusing drugs. Over 14 million people in Nigeria have problematic syndrome with drugs.
“Some people use drugs because of the way they feel from the brain or spinal cord as they are the organs that control how we feel. Harmful drugs like Cannabis, heroine, Tramadol, Cocaine, weed, Cigarettes, amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), sedative-hypnotics, and so on, cause memory loss, increased risk of respiratory disease, and difficulty in breathing. I am using this medium to encourage students to stay far away from drug abuse for them to avoid academic Waterloo,” she said.
Speaking in the same vein, the Chief Superintendent of Narcotics, Nwobie Uche, explained that drugs take 145 days to exit the body, warning that the abusers would have difficulty breathing for those days. Nwobie urged the institution not to relax the drug war.
