A cheap, synthetic drug is destroying the youth of Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leonean President Julius Maada Bio declared war on Kush this year, calling it an epidemic and a national threat.
The drug leaves users seriously ill, with many dropping out of education and turning to crime.
The trash-strewn alleys are filled with boys and young men sinking into addiction. Health care services are severely limited. A distraught community has set up what it calls a treatment center, run by volunteers. But harsh measures can be used.
The project in the capital’s Mumbai suburb of Freetown began last year when a group of people tried to help a colleague’s younger brother get off the drug called kush. After persuasion and threats failed, he was locked in his room for two months. It worked. He returned to the university and thanked them for releasing him.
“The only time I left the room was when I went to the bathroom,” 21-year-old Christian Johnson recalled. He said he was motivated to kick the drug by thoughts of his family, fear of dropping out of school and being abandoned by many of his friends.
The volunteers then expanded the effort and took over an abandoned building. They grab people at the request of their families and sometimes chain them up to prevent them from escaping – an echo of a practice once used by the West African country’s only psychiatric hospital. There is little padding on the concrete floor and walls and little you can do beyond dealing with their cravings.
“We’re turning parents away because of lack of space,” said Suleiman Turay, a local soccer coach who helped start the center. “People in the community work together and help in their own individual ways. Some bring food, some bring water, doing whatever they can to help.” A doctor in the community visits from time to time. Police said they were not aware of the project or the practice of chaining people.
![A young man smokes kush in a hideout in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Monday, April 29, 2024](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/27/06/Sierra_Leone_Drug_Addiction_59413.jpg)
![A young man smokes kush in a hideout in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Monday, April 29, 2024](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/27/06/Sierra_Leone_Drug_Addiction_59413.jpg)
So far, the Mumbai community has treated 70 to 80 people, volunteers said. One showed the chains used in extreme cases, although no one was chained at the time. The youngest prisoner was a 13-year-old boy sent there by his father.
“I was very angry and wanted nothing to do with him,” said the father, Gibrilla Bangura, a college lecturer. “I am very grateful to these men and women for their role in helping my son.”
President Julius Maada Bio has launched a drug and substance abuse task force, promising to lead a government approach that focuses on prevention and treatment that includes law enforcement and community involvement.
“We are witnessing the devastating effects of cous 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 mixed with synthetic drugs like fentanyl and tramadol and chemicals like formaldehyde. In some communities, civil society workers say, people have dug graves to rub bones to cut with the medicine, looking for chemicals used in embalming.
The director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Sierra Leone, Daphne Moffett, said one challenge in dealing with the crisis is the changing composition of the drug. “Before appropriate interventions can be developed, we need to know what materials are present in Kush,” he said in an email.
The drug leaves people lethargic, desperate and sick. Although the government does not release official figures on kush-related deaths or hospital admissions, Ansu Konneh, director of mental health at the Ministry of Social Welfare, said there had been a sharp increase in kush-addicted people presenting to the one-stop center of Sierra Leone. psychiatric hospital from 2022.
Konneh heads Sierra Leone’s first public drug addiction clinic, which opened in Freetown in February. He said Kush has affected Sierra Leone like no other drug.
“It causes young people to drop out of college and has 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 creates family disintegration, problems in communities and they die every day.”
![View of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Sunday, April 28, 2024](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/27/06/Sierra_Leone_Drug_Addiction_83026.jpg)
![View of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Sunday, April 28, 2024](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/27/06/Sierra_Leone_Drug_Addiction_83026.jpg)
Prince Bull-Luceni, director of the West African Drug Policy Network, a group that aims to promote political reforms, said Sierra Leone is the worst-hit country in the region. “Every community in Sierra Leone, not just Freetown, has been affected by Kush and it’s tearing it apart,” he told the AP, adding that without treatment or rehabilitation for most users, “there’s no way to deal with it.”
Social Linkages For Youth Development And Child Link, a non-profit organization that seeks to combat drug use, relies on former drug users to help educate youth about its toll. The organization has been lobbying the government for years to allocate more resources to fight addiction.
“Overcoming addiction was not easy. It was one of the hardest steps of my life,” said Ephraim Macaulay, a peer educator who met Kush in college and was soon paying less than a dollar for a day’s supply. “It’s like trying to get out of water and there’s water all around you.”
He motivated himself by comparing himself to friends and family. It was clean. It stank. Gradually, he stopped taking the medicine. Now he sometimes feels like crying when he talks to his peers, remembering what his life could have been like if he hadn’t stopped the addiction.
![A girl walks past a 'No more Kush' warning on a wall on Bombay Street in Freetown, Sierra Leone](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/27/06/Sierra_Leone_Drug_Addiction_37594.jpg)
![A girl walks past a 'No more Kush' warning on a wall on Bombay Street in Freetown, Sierra Leone](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/05/27/06/Sierra_Leone_Drug_Addiction_37594.jpg)
Habib Kamara, executive director of SLYDCL, said the availability of kush has increased exponentially since suppliers started manufacturing it locally. He said law enforcement must do more to target manufacturers at the top of the supply chain instead of 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 the devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa that began a decade ago. Kush had a similar impact, causing young people to drop out of school, straining the health care system and tearing families apart.
“If we can’t have an approach that reduces utilization, in the future we won’t have people replacing us tomorrow in the workforce,” Kamara said.
Some parents are exhausted. Memunatu Kamara, 49, sells smoked fish at a market in Freetown, providing the main income for her family of six. Her husband is an imam. Their eldest son has dropped out of school and stolen the few valuables they had to buy the drug.
“A very bright boy has dropped out,” she said, wiping away tears. “I feel pain seeing him in this state. I feel ashamed among my peers. I feel disappointed about his future. I have no idea what else to do about it.”
She put her son on the waiting list for the Mumbai community.