They are male and female, youngsters at the time, but each was addicted to different substances – one cheap, the other, expensive. Both however produce the same effect – compulsive addiction, which only end would have been perdition. This is the concluding part of our stories of survivors of drug addiction as told to Gboyega Alaka.
lave to opiates
Stanley (not real name), a computer programmer, was not hooked on cocaine or heroin. He was actually slave to what he called ‘the opiates’ – your tramadol, rohypnol and codeine. But he would tell you they are as bad.
“Opiates give you this buzz that can change your mood swing from a low to a high and help you forget and relax. They give this sedative kind of feeling.”
“I actually got into the habit more of carelessness,” he tells this reporter. “We were into body-building and looking for a way to build faster and this cousin of mine suggested tramadol.”
That was the beginning. But before then, he had used marijuana. Again he toes that familiar line: “I wasn’t hooked on marijuana, I wasn’t hooked on cigarette, alcohol or any other substance.”
Even though he admits to going back to these stuffs, he insists that he went back not because he couldn’t do without them. But he couldn’t do without tramadol!
“In terms of addiction, marijuana is less addictive than the opiates. Marijuana has a way of affecting your brain and can make you irrational to the extent of running mad; but you see these opiates, they will usually not affect your brain to the extent of running mad. What they do is go straight and destroy your organs- your kidneys, your liver, your lungs. That is why you see addicts slumping and dying. At most, marijuana will give you this little excitement, like cigarette; and I usually use them to get into party moods.”
Now 32, Stanley says he started his drug habit (marijuana) in secondary school in 2004. He got into tramadol at 24, primarily because he didn’t research it. He admits however that: “The fact that I’d been involved with marijuana made me more adventurous.” Did he at any time come to the realisation that he was suffering an addiction?
“I did,” he said with a straight face. “The first time I took it, I didn’t know it was possible to get hooked on something to the extent that your life means nothing without it. I only noticed it after two weeks, when I thought to myself, ‘I’m not using this thing anymore jooo, I don’t need the excitement it is giving me anymore.’ And I felt like I was sick and went to take Paracetamol or something. But it wasn’t really sickness; I was just having withdrawal symptoms.”
“Withdrawal syndrome is a feeling you really can’t exactly explain. You feel uninterested in everything. You cannot concentrate and you cannot have any reasonable conversation because everything anyone is saying would just be boring. If you sit down, you’ll feel like standing up; if you stand up, you’ll feel like lying down; the sun is shining and you’re feeling cold and vice versa. You feel irritated by the very breeze that touches your face. You suffer loss of appetite and then you won’t be able to sleep for as long as possible.”
Asked to capture the feeling the first time he took tramadol, he said, “I felt something I’d never felt before. That too is difficult to explain. The feeling was out of this world. I was ecstatic, happy and contented. Not happy, as in feeling like taking risks, but all the things that were causing me stress, such as not completing my assignments, suddenly felt like ‘What’s the big deal? What became of those who finished them?’ You just feel like your life is okay. It’s a suppressant; so some use it to get into party mood.”
Do opiates enhance sporting activities? We asked.
His answer: “I don’t think any achiever can use opium and stay on top – whether business, skill vocation or sports. The thing about it is that it reduces your efficiency over time. If you use it and it gives you 100% perfor mance, the next day, it will give you 90%, and gradually, you find yourself performing at the bottom. I’m saying this because it happened to me. I’m a computer network programmer; let’s say I use it, I could work on this entire building with say, 20 computers, in a couple of hours, because I would be like a machine. But it would not continue. The next week, if they call me, I may not even go. Most likely, I would be sleeping – because it changes your priority. Suddenly, your priority would revolve around the drug, and nothing else.
“In my office, they saw that my performance was dropping. As a normal human being, I should feel guilty and put in more effort; but with the drug, if your performance is dropping and your boss is complaining, you’d be like ‘What’s this man’s problem?’ No part of you feels guilty because the drug prioritises itself and makes you feel nothing. In fact, it rises up to your defence. That’s why it can make you steal to feed it. Bottom-line, I had to resign – because it was my first job and I could not bear to have a sack on my record.”
Battle to quit
“Meanwhile, I was struggling to stop but it was like hell. It would be sunny and I’d be feeling cold. I’d step on the ground and it’d be like I was stepping on sharp rocks. I was practically living in another world; so I’d quickly go and buy the drug and I’d become sharper than even normal people. It was obvious to me that this was not life – because though I’d never died, I knew clearly this was not living. So I started searching for help,” he said.
He went online, but most of the rehabs he saw were fee-paying. None that he saw required him coughing out anything less than N300, 000. He thought of going to his mum, but what would he tell her? Then something told him to try faith-based organisations. “I wrote to them and the next day, I got a call from a certain Mr. Charles from CADAM. That was December 2016.
But that was not the turning point for him.
“The turning point for me was when the man on the other end said to me, ‘I have read through your letter and I understand everything you’re going through.’ That last clause was everything to me. Prior to that, I couldn’t tell anybody, not even my parent – because they would not understand. You’d be surprised that even literate parents like my mum (dad was no more) still don’t understand addiction. They believe love – tough love or soft love, can make one overcome it.”
Once admitted into the one-year camp programme, Stanley said it was more or less a self battle to pool through. He’s also grateful for several other things. The feeding was free and good. “When they told me it was free and that all they needed was my health, my life and my cooperation, I just got emotional. I never knew it was possible for someone who did not use drugs to be so caring as to commit their resources to get people out of the habit. So I made a vow right there, that God get me out, I would never go near the drug again.”
Was he tempted to try cocaine? “I was tempted to go higher. With substances, you always want to go higher. But I always had this fear. Besides, I come from a small family and I always thought, ‘What if I die, what becomes of my family?”
Stanley has been free from the habit since March 28 2017 – the day he came out of CADAM rehab, and he’s sure of one thing – he’ll never go back to the habit – God help him.
Lying Tina
If there’s anything cocaine addiction taught Tina (not real name), it was effortless lying. Looking back as she told her story, pretty and delectable Tina could still not understand how she was able to string so many lies together to cover up her drug habit.
Recalling how the habit nearly robbed her of her heart-throb, of whom she gleefully announced that she’ll be getting married later this year, Tina said, “A drug addict is a very good liar. I could lies for Africa in a lying competition. That thing practically gives you inspiration to lie. It’s like a demonic entity on its own and once it takes over you, it is only the grace of God that can get you out.
“I’d just started my business, where I made bags and stuffs; but he (my fiancé) only saw that the business was thriving, I didn’t have the money to show for it. Unknown to him, the money was what was sustaining my habit. So I was always making up stories: ‘This one has not paid me, that one is owing me….’ But you can only lie for so long. At a point the lies weren’t adding up and I had to open up to him. I told him that I was battling addiction; that I was doing drug, and he was like ‘Ehen? Stop now!’ And that’s the other problem addicts face. People don’t know that it is beyond scolding and shouting. However, I actually tried to stop. For like a month. But it was like a year, and it was war! It was a daily battle.”
Recalling how it all began, she said, “It was a harmless fun that turned into a nightmare. I was hooked on crack. I started with SK weed. From skunk, I graduated to crack. There was a time a friend of mine wanted to smoke crack and he was like, ‘try it now’. So I tried it and it got really bad and I became dependent on it.”
Asked how a well-mannered lady like her got entangled in the drug web, Tina looked up and scoffed. “Are you for real? That’s a misconception. The truth is anybody can be exposed to drugs. Even if your parents hide you under the rock, there is always that chance; and if you’re unlucky to try something like that…
“I was in my 20s when I started smoking weed. I’m 32 now. I was staying by myself in Ebute-metta LSDPC and working and doing my master’s programme at UNILAG. I was unfortunate to meet this person, a girl. She wasn’t quite a heavy smoker in that sense, but once in a while, she’ll call and say, ‘Tina where are you?’ And then, I’d just go over to her place in Sabo and chill out. One thing led to the other and we became a larger crowd. You know what they say about birds of the same feather.”
Although she was aware that people who go into drugs sometimes go mad, she never thought that could be her story. Besides, she didn’t think she was hooked on skunk; she also didn’t see any negative effects in the habit – or that it was destroying her life. “You never really know how deep you are inside until you’re fully engulfed and it’s too late. The funny thing is that I didn’t even get into the habit as an undergraduate.”
About crack, she said she met a new person; a medical doctor. “We met online and decided to hang out together. Of course we smoked weed, and then one day, he said, ‘Let’s try something else. I can get crack.’ I was like ‘What’s crack?’ And he said ‘Cocaine.’
“The first thing I did was go to Google its effect. As far as I was concerned, the high was what mattered. Maybe if I had checked the consequences. I saw a portion where they said it can cause heart attack; but when I raised it with him, he just dismissed it. Why would he, a doctor, push me into something that is that harmful, he queried. That allayed my fear. Not long after, I was the one who was asking for it.”
Interestingly, she said she wasn’t dating the guy or any other guy in her junkie group.
While reflecting on the whole escapade during her rehab time at CADAM, she concluded that it could only have been a result of her depressive state at some point during her master’s programme. She was having extreme low moments and even had to quit her job as sales rep. “I was masking my depression with the highs; meanwhile my personal life was in shambles.”
That ‘high,’ she says “is better experienced. It will hold you captive. It will run your life, such that everything you do is propelled by the habit. You’re like ‘Ok, I’d get the money, I’d buy crack; I’d get the money, I’d get another fix…’”
But is the drug readily available? “It is very available if you’re looking for it. In this Lagos o. For a while, my doctor friend was getting it for me, but I literally forced him to tell me the source and started getting it myself. You can get a fix for as low as N300. The bad thing however is that you can sell a whole house and smoke it all in one day because you’d just be smoking it back to back. You can even sell a whole estate. Of course you could get killed for overdose but you would not be thinking of that. The thing is that the high goes away in a matter of seconds and then you want another fix.
Recalling how it affected her business, she said, “At a point, I couldn’t pay my workers and my sister had to step in. I was telling lies upon lies to cover up my habit until the bubble burst. After my effort to stop failed and the whole cycle started again, my guy was like, ‘This cannot go on. You have to get help and I have to tell your family.’ His family later found out. It was the day I was supposed to go into CADAM. I was in company of him and my mother. And then I looked up and saw a member of his family church. And I was the only one looking like she was on drug.
“By the time I came home for a break after six months, the mum was like, ‘Never!’ But she eventually came round. But I understood that she wanted the best for her son.”
At what point did she overcome the urge, we prodded. Her response: “Do you really overcome the urge? Seeing people who had been able to overcome the habit was my motivation. Aside that, the urge can come anytime. Even recently it came. It is something you have tasted, which you know is sweet but which you also know is bad. To tell you the truth, you’ll never find me in a room with crack. The temptation will be too high. That’s why I’ve resolved to run away from it as far as possible.
Advise for youths?
“They should never try it. The temptation might be too much and your story may just be that terrible one out of a million.
‘Drug addiction in Nigeria has reached epidemic level’
Crime Against Drug Abuse Ministry (CADAM) National Coordinator, Dr Dokun Adedeji, speaks on the alarming level of drug addiction in the country, his organisation’s effort and why the government must rise up to the challenge.
CLEARLY, you guys are into something massive here. Tell us about CADAM
CADAM, Crime Against Drug Abuse Ministry, was initially a church ministry under which we went out to people or families with drug problems; but over the years, it outgrew such limitations to the extent that we are now involved in providing care, treatment and rehabilitation to drug addicts. We are a faith-based NGO affiliated to the Redeemed Christian Church of God and right now, we have two centres. The primary one is a one-year programme in Epe opened by former Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode in 2017. Recently, we opened the second in Abeokuta, which caters for undergraduates or first time users, occasional users and social users – people who are not drug addicts but happen to have used drugs or tested positive and were referred to us for rehabilitation. But our intention is to into schools, into states… We’re already talking with Kwara and Ekiti states; we’re also working with Lagos State to set up something – not necessarily a rehab.
How do you finance it? The word out there is that it is free.
Let me say this: the major one in Epe is free, no matter your nationality or religious persuasion; but in the other one we just started, people are required to pay a token. Every month, we spend N15million. That’s huge and frankly, how we meet up with the expenses sometimes surprises me. The church gives us about 40% and we make up the rest from donations. As of now, we don’t have international donors, but we’re working at that. We now have a director in charge of finance and corporate services, so we are gradually putting in place conditions to satisfy them.
How do you handle the tough ones?
The thing is we know what the dynamism of this thing is like. They want to stay but when the craving comes, they begin to misbehave and ask to leave, but we don’t send them away, we manage them with patience and wisdom. And when the craving recedes, some of them cool down and stay. But that is not to say that some don’t leave. Don’t forget that the programme is voluntary. So if they insist, we call their families and hand them over.
Do you have to use medications?
We call it cold turkey; which means we don’t use medication – except when there are other corollaries that needs medical attention.
How many have you been able to rescue since inception?
It can’t be less than 1,000. We take 200 per session, and we have two sessions in a year. That’s 400 a year. The ministry was founded in 1991 but we did not start our residential programme until 1996. For the female, we started in 2003; and we moved into our permanent site, a world class institution in 2017.
How potent is the drug danger?
It is huge. I can tell you for free that it’s an epidemic. The nation had better wake up to deal with this emerging trend; else we’d be consumed by it. If you want to know what I mean, all you need do is take a look at the escalating level of crime and all the suicides and stuffs. They may not be directly related but these are some of the things you can say are consequences. Many young people do the craziest of things to fuel and fund these things. There is the yahoo yahoo, and the boko haram and the kidnapping, and I can tell you that no one can do these things with clear eyes. They have to be induced by something. So the nation really has to wake up; and I’m glad that the federal government set up the Buba Marwa commission to look into those things.