Like a time bomb that is bound to explode if not urgently detonated, the rising incidence of drug abuse which has been resulting in mental health illnesses among the citizens, precisely teenagers and youths, may in the near future spell doom for the country if not quickly addressed. The Federal Neuro Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba few days ago said the facility recorded 50 per cent increase in the number of patents treated for drug and substance abuse last year. The worrisome development according to experts has ruined the lives of many promising young boys and girls and rearing to destroy more if not immediately tamed. INNOCENT DURU who visited some psychiatric homes reports:
“This boy has dented my image. As a pastor, how can I explain it that my son indulged in drug abuse, to the extent that he has developed mental illness? What on earth led him into this demonic venture?”
The above was the lamentation of a clergyman whose son had developed mental illness after a period of indulging in substance abuse.
Frustration was written all over him as he paced up and down wondering what had befallen him and how he would have the courage to still mount the pulpit to ask wayward church members to turn a new leaf.
“I am at loss over what has happened to me. He had always been a good boy and everybody around could swear that he couldn’t have touched a cigarette before. If I were not around and somebody had said this to me on the phone, I would have refused to believe it because I trusted him. There was no sign that he was into such. How he got into all this remains a mystery to me,” the distraught father said.
A relation of a female victim, who gave his name simply as John, was embittered as he shared the story of his sister’s plight.
He said: “We saw all this coming and all our efforts to stop her was rejected by her. Unfortunately, we are the ones still bearing the brunt of her recklessness. She is in her late teens but she has always lived a wild life. She goes out and returns to the house anytime she likes. At times, acrid smell of alcohol would be oozing out from her mouth.
“The first time I saw cigarette in her bag, she said it was her friend that forgot it and she decided to keep it for her. I foolishly believed her without knowing that was one of her tools of self-destruction.”
“It has been financially and psychologically challenging taking care of her. The stigma alone is worse than anything you can think of because everybody now uses that to describe our family.”
A relation of a sickle cell patient, who is also mentally sick, said he developed the illness after getting addicted to injecting himself with tramadol meant to relieve pains.
“They sometimes give them such powerful pain killer whenever they have crisis. But he got addicted to it and always used it even when he didn’t have pains. That was what resulted in her mental problem.
“The problem we are facing is now two folds. From dealing with sickle cell problems, we are also now faced with the problem of managing his mental illness. All this costs a lot of money and it is physically, emotionally and psychologically distressing.”
An undergraduate in one of the rehabilitation homes visited by our correspondent, according to the care giver, suffered the fate after recklessly indulging in consumption of cannabis.
“I learnt that he started indulging in hard drugs by mixing the cannabis leaf with beans. He subsequently moved from there to smoking it. At that point, he became very daring and began to bully people around.
“ It is a very unfortunate development because all the efforts to give him a very sound education in a private university appears to have become a huge waste. Where are the people that led him into this? Have they not all gone their various ways?”
At Abeokuta, another care giver said he had tried to stop the child from the unholy practice of drug abuse to no avail.
“He was always going to some bad joints at Lafenwa where all manner of wayward children converge to indulge in reckless use of drugs. If you get a part of the area, you will find a heap of cough syrups that these people have drunk. Apart from cough syrups, they also indulge in the use of cannabis, codeine and tramadol. There is one thing that they call sokudaya that they also use.
On several occasions, we tried luring him away from that place but he kept returning there but it was as if he was under a spell to consume drugs. I am seriously worried that in spite of the large number of security outfits we have in the country, drugs are still being publicly sold. If the drugs are not so much available, many of our children would not have access to it.”
Experts decry the rise mental illness among substance users. There have been growing concerns among psychiatrists about the wave of mental illness among substance abusers.
The 2018 annual report of the Federal Neuro Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, obtained by our correspondent, showed that there was 5o per cent increase in the number of patents treated for drug and substance abuse last year.
The annual report showed that a total number of males treated in the facility rose from 133 in 2017 to 195 in 2018. The figures of the females rose from 24 in 2017 to 40 in 2018.
Speaking on the development, a psychiatrist in the hospital, Dr Modupeola Omotojesi, said:
“Our statistics has shown us that the use of substance has increased, especially in age groups. We are seeing it in younger individuals between 15 and 16 years . We are increasingly seeing it. Statistics has shown us that most children are beginning to use it more from primary six to Junior Secondary School 1 level as their first level of introduction. What we see is just a tip of the ice bag compared to what is happening in the society.
“It is on a very increased level and it is something that everybody, the government, the society, the family needs to be seriously concerned about. The number of patients using substance has increased in the facility. Substance abuse is like a monster. We really don’t know what has hit us as a country .”
She noted that the development portends a lot of danger locally, nationally and internally. “One of the major dangers it posses is the quality of the next generation we are going to produce because the use of substances itself has shown that when it gets to addiction level, it is a brain disease.
“Imagine having a population of young people who are the future of tomorrow already having impaired functioning because of the use of the substances that they have taken, what would be the quality of our leadership in future if we don’t start attending to it now and begin to take care of it as an epidemic? It is at an epidemic level. Measures have to be taken. We need a lot of advocacy, a lot of education, and we need to be aggressive educating the young ones about what these substances are, and what implications they have on individuals and the nation as a whole”.
She advised there should be control on the availability of these substances, adding: “We need to tighten availability. We should not be talking about it in hush tones. Drugs abusers could be infected with HIV in the course of sharing needles; the y could have liver damage, Hepatitis, lung infections and cancer. The person can have personality problems
“When you have an individual that is anti- social, and you are having them on the increase, they could cause a lot of violence. Once you are under the influence of substance, you can do anything.
The use of substances is also a factor for the increase in crime rate in the society because if you do a screening for a lot of people that are violent, many of them have some form of substance in their system. Substance facilitates violence.”
One of the consultants managing the drug abuse unit at Neuro-Psychiatry Hospital, Aro, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Dr Sunday Amosu, also lamented the development. “In recent times, drugs have become ubiquitous. It is in every nook and cranny of the society and there is no class distinction. The adults are there and the youths are predominant. The old men also have their alcohol problems too. Those drugs that were not with us before are now here. In the past, there were some synthetic drugs like Adam and Eve and MMVA that were used abroad but one way or the other they have been smuggled to Nigeria .
“Some cliques have access to these drugs. Some few years back, a lab was discovered at Satellite Town where some of these synthetic drugs were being produced here for export. Definitely, such drugs would get to the market here too. Drug is a big problem. Even in our environment, cannabis is the number one illicit substance.
“Studies in our environment as far back as the 90s by the late Professor Odejide say that the first exposure to drug is in the early teenage years.
“ However, before parents get to know, it is always some months later. People have seen children who are 10 or 11 years doing drugs but parents may not know until much later. but on the average, majority started in secondary school”, he said.
Amosu, who is a senior consultant psychiatrist at the Abeokuta hospital, described drug abuse as a robber, noting that it makes the person to lose everything as he would not be able to play his role in the society. He can’t contribute to the GDP of the country. Such people make unemployment rate to increase. He could develop mental illness and liver problems. If they are hospitalised, man –hours are lost and the families are affected.
“When one person in the family is sick, it affects the others and they have to cough out the money that is not enough. It is a vicious circle because everybody will be affected. Even when they have this problem, they also recruit some other people. Drug abuse does no one any good in the society. All hands must be on deck to tackle it. There is no doubt about the prevalence.”
Tell- tale signs that your child is abusing drugs
Delving into his wealth of experience, Dr Amosu enumerated some tell-tale signs that show somebody is abusing drugs. “Some of them can be smelling of alcohol, some people could have angular stomatitis that show this person has been long on alcohol. Those indulging in cannabis can have blood- shot eyes. On those who inject needle, you can see needle track.
“ Even at home, you can notice it when somebody develops sudden change in behaviour, an easy going guy confronting his father and warning him. When you see that the behaviour of your child suddenly changes and he is becoming more secretive, you have a high index of suspicion. When the circle of friends changes and the ones he comes home with look wild and like yahoo yahoo boys, you should be suspicious of him. Confront him and if he denies, bring him to the hospital so that we can run a test. There are many things that when we even get from the client, we don’t tell the parents so that we don’t break their hearts. We may not tell them the extent because when they hear, it would break their heart”.
Parents, he said, should have the spare keys of the children’s rooms and should find time to go there to carry out some checks. “Sometimes, you can find what we call paraphernalia of drugs like matches, lighter and so on.
“ Some of them try to mask it by eating candies that have mentol flavour. Some use perfume and roll on. They tend to be secretive and would not come to the sitting room when everybody is there. When a child repeatedly takes his bath, it could be an attempt to mask the odour of the drugs.”
He added: “When you are in doubt, there are tests that you can do if you have the facility. You can do urine screen and that will pick out cannabis and other drugs. Those who have breathe analyser, it could pick out acceptable alcohol level and also detect if it is higher than normal from the breath.
“When you pick it and the person denies, you can do a confrontational interview by saying the test reveals this, what do you have to say? At that point, you will see them stammering. Some at an anxious stage would be the one to come out and say, I have this problem, please help me. “
Stages in drug abuse
Dr Amosu went on to list the four stages in drug abuse. “The first is the stage of experimentation or the stage of initial contact. At that stage he is taking it only once in a while. At this stage there is no tell-tale sign. People may not even know unless somebody stumbles on him.
“The second stage is that of more regular use. Here he uses it and can now go and buy it and still managing to function at home and in the society and as long as he is functioning, nobody might know. There is no curiosity around him.
“The third stage is the stage of abuse when they would begin to develop problems like drunk driving, involving in auto-crash, having issues at work. Before they get to that point, some five, six years might have added to their age. That is why you could see them in their late teens and 20s.
“The final stage is the stage of dependence or stage of addiction. The hallmark of that stage is what is called tolerance and withdrawal syndrome. Tolerance means that he needs to increase the dose to get the desired effect. That is the addiction we are talking about. It is a stage where the person cannot do without it. The withdrawal symptom is the psycho-psychological symptoms that are specific to the substance. When the person does not have access to the substance, he would begin to develop these symptoms.
“Those who take drugs like heroine and petazozin, when they don’t have access to them, they would begin to have flu-like symptoms as if they have malaria.They would be drooling saliva, drooling water from the nose , water from the eyes and goose pimples all over the body. That is what is referred to in street parlance as jonsing. Immediately he takes the drug again, the symptom vanishes. People on this stage are less compared to other stages.
NDLEA yet to speak
Contacted for the reaction of the agency on the menace of drug abuse and its attendant consequences on the citizens, the spokesperson of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) , Jonah Achema, promised to provide a response. He was, however. yet to respond as at the time of filing this report.