By Vivian Onyebukwa
Parents and anti-narcotics agents have been called upon to pay more attention to food served at ceremonies in villages as food meant for youths is deliberately laced with drugs, especially Indian Hemp.
This call was made known during the unveiling of the “Beauty for Ashes Rehabilitation Centre” for victims of drug abuse in the Ijegun area of Lagos by a non-governmental organization known as the “Centre For Correction and Human Development (CCHD).
The organisation is dedicated to the promotion and enhancement of quality of life and the re-establishment and development of human personality through counselling, mentoring, rehabilitation, education and empowerment of young people in Nigeria. The Beauty For Ashes Centre is one of its latest projects.
The chairman of the occasion, Godwin James, a lawyer, who made this revelation, lamented that the desperation to widen the drug market is alarming and lacing food meant for the youth is one effective method they have devised.
He said: “The painful part of it is that traditional rulers who are aware of these now encourage it by insisting that meals meant for the youth should be prepared separately. These happen during big events in villages, like traditional weddings and burial ceremonies. Through food laced with Indian hemp, they get them addicted, and by so doing, they create a lucrative hard drug market in the villages.The community knows about it, and they accept it.”
He further stated that the judiciary has no hand in failing to get proper convictions in most cases. “When these drug barons are arrested, all these so-called anti-narcotic agencies will detain them and extort as much money from them as possible. This is when you hear things like plea bargain and most importantly, these drugs are sold to the highest bidder, who ends up selling them in Nigeria. The buyers are known to these security agents, and they are always on standby to buy them of,” he alleged.
He added that the only way out is for the family system to do much more to help the children stay away from drugs.
According to him, “the government should, on their part, start sanitizing the system from the top, where easy access into the country is permitted or tolerated.”
On who is allowed to check into the centre, the executive director of CCHD, Obioma Agoziem, said that the intending patient is expected to contact CCHD through its various communication channels on its website, www.cchdnigeria.org.
According to Agoziem, the centre was created to help reduce the pressure on state facilities, which are overburdened by the high rise in the number of cases reported in Lagos State. She said: “The individual will undergo a process of screening that includes counseling and laboratory tests. It is then that we can determine if he or she is fit to be sent to our rehabilitation centre.
“At the centre, we have a psychiatric consultant, therapists and nurses. We also have a skill acquisition centre, which the patient is expected to enrol in during the duration of their stay.”
She further called on the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency due to the spate of spread of the use of hard drugs in the country. “In 2018, there was a surge in the number of cases that we had. People kept calling, asking for help and a private rehabilitation centre. The state government has its own facility, but it is not enough to effectively attend to the psychological needs of these patients.
“This centre was designed to bridge the gap. In as much as we are doing our part to help victims, the government needs to do much more to save our youth.”
During his welcome address, Martin Akpaka, founding president of CCHD, further explained that the centre was established to provide in-house care and dedicated attention for victims of drug abuse with a view to weaning them systematically out of that condition and getting them back to a reasonable level of sanity. “The rehabilitation centre is a temporary site for use pending the completion of our main comprehensive centre.”
He added that a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) puts the 2023 statistics on drug abuse in Nigeria at around 40% of the youth population, with the highest prevalence in Lagos, Gombe, and Oyo states.