Musician Draws Attention To Drug Abuse In Nigeria
The growing menace of drug abuse in Nigeria has once against come to the fore after a musician dropped a skit revealing how young people in the country get addicted to hard drugs.
— The Whistler NG (@TheWhistlerNG) April 28, 2018
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Recall that last year, the Senate raised the alarm that the 19 Northern states of Nigeria were under serious threat due to drug abuse, stating that over three million bottles of codeine syrup were consumed daily in Kano and Jigawa states.
It disclosed that across the 19 states, women, young girls in tertiary institutions, working class ladies, married, unemployed women displaced by Boko Haram insurgency, among others, were involved in drug abuse, and that in 2015 alone, over 2,205 people were arrested in North-West geo-political zone by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, over drug-related abuses.
The Upper Chamber also asked the Federal Government to partner with relevant stakeholders, states, local governments, traditional rulers, Pharmacists Council of Nigeria, NGOs, to create a holistic framework to fight this category of drug abuse, especially in the North.
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A chilling tale by one Fatima to an investigator of ICIR Abuja in Kaduna, depicted the horrifying state of drug addiction among Nigerian women, especially in the Northern part of the country.
According to the ICIR, Fatima Hassan, a 2010 graduate of the Kaduna Polytechnic, who still lives with her mother, was introduced to drugs when she went for her National Youth Service Corp in Minna, Niger State, when she started dating the son of a wealthy man.
“My boyfriend had many friends and all of them were taking drugs like cocaine, wee-wee, syrup and some tablets, and he made me to join them.”
She joined the girls in taking bottles of cough mixtures with codeine contents. The ones without codeine do not excite the brain, so they are not useful.
The boys would take hard drugs like cocaine, heroin or wee-wee and get syrup for the girls. There are varieties of them, including CSP, Stopcof, C&C, Cofflin, Totalin, Emzolyn and the prices range from N250 to N1000 per bottle.
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After her NYSC, Fatima came back to Kaduna and started looking for where to get the codeine syrup. Soon, she met other girls who had become addicted like her, and began buying for herself.
According to her, in the last five years, she has met more than 200 girls and women who take codeine in Kaduna.
