Drug Abuse As A National Emergency
Chuks Akamadu argues that government must do more to curb drug abuse
When Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid Al Makhtoum wrote in his book, My Vision: Challenges in the Race for Excellence, “What I wish most for the youth of the United Arab Emirates is success...all I want is for each one of our young men and women to make their own success story”, he reminded me of our own President Mohammadu Buhari who is at present waging a relentless war against corruption ostensibly to secure the future of youths of Nigeria and offer them a platform to attain, like their peers in UAE, deserved individual accomplishments.
Whereas the UAE narrative has since become what lawyers call “Locus Classicus” in a universal sense, the Nigerian aspiration remains an experiment assailed by a demon that crept in on the nation in the dead of the night called “drug Abuse”. When President Buhari declared that If we fail to kill corruption, that corruption will kill Nigeria, those factual words of his drew applause - and for good measure too, but what he appeared not to have taken cognisance of is that those to whom the new future he seeks to build belongs are being decimated without ceasing by the menace of drug abuse and drug addiction.
Pray, who shall tell the president that drug abuse and drug trafficking deserve no less fury than corruption? Please let those who have Mr. President’s ears tell him that the war against drug abuse is a matter of life and death! Someone should also be kind enough to commend Wife of the President, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, for insisting that “collective efforts by relevant stakeholders to end drug abuse have become necessary”.
Research has shown that there is exponential population growth among young people of Nigeria who do drugs. More and more youths are subscribing to Bob Marley’s false preachment of “When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself”; yet there are those who acknowledge drug abuse and drug addiction as evil, but are quick to justify or, at a minimum, rationalise it by finding solace in the contemptible words of a Sophist, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who argued thus: “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness... in effect, antidepressant are a means of modifying an individual internal state in such a way as to enable him tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”
Notwithstanding the debate on whose lot it is to carry the can in the foregoing regard, the bad news is that drug abuse is here and doing incalculable damage to our today and our tomorrow alike. Sadly the beautiful rhetoric and semantics that have come to characterise the phenomenon have not in any way operated to either contain or curtail it. Things have only gotten progressively worse. The concern really is that no argument, however sound, can erase the fact that substance abuse wrecks the consumer, their family and the society, just as it is not debatable that it also compromises national security as well as endangers public health. What is more, the statistics are most frightening. Out of 196 countries on planet earth, United Nations Office on Drug and Crimes (UNODC) in its 2014 World Drug Report (WDR) rated Nigeria as “Number One” in cannabis sativa seizure. Similarly, according to Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Kaduna, six million bottles of codeine expectorant are sold in the North-Western part of the country daily. That is not all. Disclosures made by the National Law Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) indicate that in 2015 alone, the agency seized within our borders, narcotic drugs valued at N22bn.
The tragedy however is that despite and in spite of these startling revelations, the nation appears to be carrying on as though not much is at stake. Obviously the NDLEA is overwhelmed. Why won’t it be? There are reports that those who are supposed to take sides with the law are the ones trampling upon it. Whilst ordinary citizens do their thing in the comfort of their homes and designated hideouts, a section of our political elite and a growing clan of unscrupulous elements within the security and law enforcement agencies are said to be doing same in their official fortresses with absolute state protection.
Drug abuse is a plague on the nation...worse still, it deteriorates by the second. Our collective failure to give it the attention it deserved has emboldened it to become fashionable; and as a fad, the vulnerable are being left at the mercy of peddlers and consumers who are constantly recruiting. As things stand, it makes little or no differences that NDLEA was able to arrest 34,499 suspects and secured 7,317 convictions against offenders between 2012 and 2015. On the contrary, what matters the most is that the outcome of the agency’s best efforts is regrettably a drop in the ocean, and the nation - particularly her youth, remains on all fours as casualty figures keep rising.
In some parts of the country married women are equally guilty just as children are readily yielding to it with little or no persuasion. The question then is: whither the future of the nation? Because it leaves everyone, directly or indirectly, on the “Victim List”. Frankly speaking, critical stakeholders can no longer afford to sit idly by and expect the NDLEA to solely quench this wildfire.
Dan Masanin Kano, Alhaji Maitama Sule once told this writer that “the joy of a dying father is the presence of worthy successors”. As they say in Igboland, our leaders should “jiri ire ha guo eze ha ogu” (use their tongue to count their teeth”).
It is high time the federal government found the courage to acknowledge the inadequacy of NDLEA in the daunting task of arresting and possibly reversing the deepening drug abuse trend in Nigeria. With the way things stand, the federal government should urgently seek to galvanise the critical mass necessary for waging a multi-sectoral war against drug abuse and drug addiction, otherwise the agency statutorily charged with this responsibility would at best continue to maintain clearly ineffectual presence at our borders and inter-state check points whilst rogue courier service companies continue to profit maximally from intra-city distribution of cannabis sativa, codeine expectorants, skonk, heroin, cocaine and a legion of other contemporary harmful drug brands.