Drug and crime: Twin menace ravaging Nigerian society

In Nigeria today, the connection between drug and crime cannot be underestimated, going by the rate at which drugs are recovered from suspected criminals across the country.

In fact, many curious observers have rightly concluded that the audacity with which most dangerous crimes are being committed nowadays cannot be divorced from the unrestricted access to and use of hard drugs and other psychotropic substances by the perpetrators. This is moreso a truism as security agents continue to make hauls of hard drugs at virtually every crime scene.

And closely linked to this growing twin menace is their third leg of the troika - cultism - now prevalent in many neighbourhoods in the country.

In 2017, over 600 suspects were arrested by the police for various drug-induced crimes ranging from armed robbery, kidnap and cultism in Lagos State alone. Similarly, Lagos State Commandant of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Sule Aliyu, said the agency recovers over 10 tons of drugs and prosecute more than 300 suspects in the state annually.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Edgal Imohimi, on Oct. 17, 2017 destroyed N50 million worth of drugs recovered during raids on hoodlums’ hideouts across the state.

Imohimi had said at the various town hall meetings he held on assumption of office in Lagos last year that community leaders kept complaining about the twins menace of drug abuse and cultism in virtually all the neighbourhoods in the state.

His words: “When people have access to drugs, it emboldens them to get involved in crimes. Cultism is also a problem where teenagers are involved in cultrelated violence and narcotic substances are recovered from them which is enough to draw the attention of the police.

“Children now take cough syrups to get high. What are we doing as parents and guardians. We should surprise our children once in a while and search their rooms to know if they are doing drugs.”

Available police statistics show that 98 per cent of 200 suspected cultists arrested in Lagos State last year were youths between the age of 17 and 35 years. This goes to show that cultism has gone