Drug abuse in the North
The Senate recently raised an alarm that the entire 19 states of the North face serious dangers of a drug abuse epidemic. It said over three million bottles of codeine cough syrup are being abused daily in Kano and Jigawa states alone. While the movement and other logistics of three million bottles of codeine is rather difficult to comprehend and while it isn’t clear where the Senate got the statistic, the consumption of illegal mind altering medical products, including cough syrup, appears to have become something of an epidemic in the North.
Citing a report from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency [NDLEA], the Senate stated that 2,205 people were arrested in the Northwest zone in 2015 for drug abuse. Those engaged in the abuse include married women, internally displaced persons from Boko Haram ravaged areas, students of tertiary institutions and young girls, among others. The senators heard that secondary school students also consume the drugs. It then mandated its Joint Committees on Drugs, Narcotics and Health to investigate the use and abuse of prescription drugs and report back for necessary legislative intervention.
Senate President Bukola Saraki said the Senate would do everything within its powers to fight the menace. He said, “I want to commend lawmakers for their contributions. This is becoming a big issue for the country. Yesterday I had the chance of meeting with pharmaceutical practitioners. We need to amend the NDLEA Act to reflect the current realties.”
While drug abused is a national problem, we believe there has been an alarming uptick in the North in recent years. In the region, the states mostly in the news for widespread drug abuse are Kano, Jigawa, Katsina and Kaduna. The abuse is no longer limited to men-folk but is also trending among young women. The situation is bad as it is but the unfolding pattern promises something even worse, unless something is done urgently. We’re likely to see increased criminal activities, more divorce cases, more children born out of wedlock, more accidents, more school dropouts, more political thugs disposed to violence and the death of our societal values. You don’t need to search for long to see studies that draw correlations between drug abuse and the foregoingadverse outcomes.
Many factors came together to engendered this social threat, among them unemployment, broken homes, poor upbringing, irresponsible husbands and so forth. While this is a serious problem, it’s not unsurmountable. Others have done it before. But deliberate, coordinated efforts must be fashioned out to reach the desired goal. That’s why no government should embark on a lone attempt to fix the problem but there should be a region wide solution, since the states concerned share cultural and communal values.
We therefore join the Senate in calling on the three arms of government to join hands together with all stakeholders such as Pharmaceutical Council of Nigeria, National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and NGOs to find a solution. But we are also quick to add that, the traditional institution and the clergy must come together and agree on solutions, and then depart to implement their assigned responsibilities. This is also an opportunity for the National Orientation Agency to prove that it is still relevant. The organization should use its expertise in the mechanics of social campaigns to design informative and entertaining messages that would linger and be remembered once heard.
The government should sponsor some outreach programmes in churches and mosques especially targeted at the youth. Rehabilitation centers in the country are also rather few. More should be created. Other nations take this seriously. We should too. For example, in Indonesia and Malaysia, trafficking in illegal drugs above a certain weight attracts a death sentence. In the case of Malaysia, the first thing a visitor to the country will see boldly written on the visa is that “drug trafficking carries the death penalty.” It should at least attract a stiff penalty here.