FREETOWN, Sierra Leone – In Sierra Leone, a cheap synthetic drug is devastating youth. Trash-filled alleys are full of boys and young men who have fallen into addiction. Health services are severely limited. A frustrated community has created what it calls a treatment center, run by volunteers. But harsh measures can be used.
The project in the Bombay suburb of the capital, Freetown, began last year, when a group of people tried to help a colleague’s younger brother give up the drug called kush. After persuasion and threats failed, they locked him in his room for two months. It worked. He returned to the university and thanked them for freeing him.
“The only time I left the room was when I went to the bathroom,” remembers Christian Johnson, 21. He said he was motivated to quit the drug by thoughts of his family, fear of giving up the habit and the abandonment of many of his friends.
The volunteers then expanded the effort and occupied an abandoned building. At the request of families, they arrest people and sometimes chain them to prevent them from escaping – an echo of a practice that the West African country’s only psychiatric hospital used previously. There is little padding on the concrete floor and walls, and little to do other than face your desire.
“We turned parents away because of lack of space,” said Suleiman Turay, a local soccer coach who helped launch the center. “People in the community cooperate and help in their individual ways. Some bring food, others bring water, doing what they can to help.” A community doctor visits from time to time. Police said they had no knowledge of the project or the practice of chaining people.
So far, the Bombay Community has treated 70 to 80 people, volunteers said. One of them showed the chains used in extreme cases, although no one was chained at the time. The youngest detainee was a 13-year-old boy sent there by his father.
“I was very angry and didn’t want anything to do with him,” said his father, Gibrilla Bangura, a university professor. “I am so grateful to these men and women for their role in helping my son.”
Sierra Leone’s president, Julius Maada Bio, this year declared war on kush, calling it an epidemic and national threat. He launched a working group on drug and substance abuse, promising to lead a government-focused approach to prevention and treatment, involving law enforcement and community engagement.
“We are witnessing the destructive consequences of kush on the very foundations of our country, on our young people,” Bio said in April.
People rarely know what they’re getting with kush, a cannabis derivative laced with synthetic drugs like fentanyl and tramadol and chemicals like formaldehyde. In some communities, civil society workers say, people have dug graves to grind up bones and cut them with the drug, looking for chemicals used in embalming.
The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Sierra Leone, Daphne Moffett, said a challenge in responding to the crisis is the change in the composition of the medicine. “Before appropriate interventions can be developed, we need to know what materials are in Kush,” she said in an email.
The drug makes people lethargic, desperate and sick. Although the government does not publish official figures on kush-related deaths or hospital admissions, Ansu Konneh, director of mental health at the Ministry of Social Welfare, said there has been a sharp increase in the number of kush-addicted people showing up at the only kush establishments. Sierra Leone. psychiatric hospital since 2022.
Konneh leads the first public drug rehabilitation program in Sierra Leone, which opened in Freetown in February. He said kush affected Sierra Leone like no other drug.
“It’s causing young people to drop out of college and it’s having a physical effect on their health. You can see they have swollen feet, they have multiple organ failure, they are involved in crimes,” he said. “It is a very serious situation. It’s creating family disintegration, problems in communities, and they die every day.”
Prince Bull-Luseni, director of the West African Drug Policy Network, a group that aims to promote policy reforms, said Sierra Leone is the hardest-hit country in the region. “Every community in Sierra Leone, not just Freetown, has been hit by kush and it is tearing them apart,” he told the AP, adding that without treatment or rehabilitation for the majority of users, “there is no way to solve the problem”.
Social Linkages For Youth Development And Child Link, a nonprofit that seeks to combat drug use, relies on former drug users to help educate young people about its costs. The organization has lobbied the government for years to allocate more resources to combat addiction.
“Overcoming addiction was not easy. It was one of the hardest steps of my life,” said Ephraim Macaulay, a peer educator who discovered kush in college and was soon paying less than a dollar for a day’s supply. “It’s like you’re trying to get out of the water and there’s water all around you.”
He motivated himself by comparing himself to friends and family. They were clean. He stank. Gradually, he stopped taking the drug. Now he sometimes feels like crying when talking to colleagues, remembering what his life might have been like if he hadn’t kicked the habit.
Habib Kamara, executive director of SLYDCL, said the availability of kush grew exponentially after suppliers started manufacturing it locally. He said law enforcement needs to do more to target manufacturers at the top of the supply chain rather than going after low-level buyers and sellers. The government has said it wants to help, not punish, those who use the drug.
“This country has fought two pandemics,” he said, listing COVID and the devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa that began a decade ago. Kush has had a similar impact, causing young people to drop out of school, overwhelming the healthcare system and destroying families.
“If we can’t have an approach that reduces usage, in the future we won’t have people to replace us in the workforce tomorrow,” Kamara said.
Some parents are exhausted. Memunatu Kamara, 49, sells smoked fish at a market in Freetown, providing the main income for his family of six. Her husband is a magnet. Their son, the eldest, dropped out of school and stole the few valuables they had to buy the drugs.
“A very intelligent boy dropped out of school,” she said, wiping away tears. “I feel pain seeing him in this condition. I feel shame among my colleagues. I feel discouraged about his future. I have no idea what else to do about it.”
She put her son on the Bombay Community waiting list.
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Associated Press writer Jessica Donati in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.
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