By Julius Spencer
About a year ago, President Bio declared a State of Emergency as a means of combatting what had become a major issue across the country: addiction to the synthetic drug, Kush, that was apparently causing many young people to die on the streets of Freetown and other parts of the country. Rehabilitation centres were established to treat and rehabilitate victims of the drug and law enforcement was ostensibly stepped up to break the supply chain.
Fast forward to a few months ago, and rather than get better, the situation had worsened. Things came to a head when the Mayor of Freetown made a public pronouncement that from the beginning of the year to the time she was speaking, the Freetown City Council had collected over 200 bodies of people killed by kush on the streets of Freetown. This got an immediate reaction from the Minister of Local government who wrote to her asking for evidence not only of the number of dead bodies collected, but proof that they died as a result of kush addiction. The Mayor immediately fired back with a comprehensive list indicating dates and locations where the bodies were retrieved. The Mayor also said that the FCC would no longer collect dead bodies from the streets. And lo and behold, like a scene from a farcical drama, a short while later, the public is informed that the government collected 27 corpses from the streets of Freetown in a month and 23 of them died from natural causes. The postmortem examinations of these corpses were carried out by the octogenarian government medical examiner. Of course, the public has not been told what these natural causes were.
I wonder whether someone is trying to convince the public that as the Speaker of Parliament had said, the kush situation is not as bad as some people are making it out to be. I sincerely hope that is not the case because if indeed 23 people were found dead on the streets of Freetown in a month and it is found that they died from natural causes, that should be a cause for more concern that if they died from kush and would need a major investigation.
This situation reminds me of COVID and how COVID deaths were classified in Sierra Leone and some other countries. For a death to be recorded as a COVID death, the person had to have died with the live virus still present in his/her blood. So even if the person had tested positive for the virus and underwent treatment in a treatment facility, even if the person died in the facility, as long as the COVID test showed that there was no live virus present in the person’s blood at the time of death, the death was not recorded as a COVID death.
A particular case stands out for me. I was doing a short video documentary about treatment in a COVID treatment centre as a means of encouraging members of the public to report as soon as they started experiencing COVID like symptoms. I filmed in the treatment centre at the 34 military hospital and while doing the filming, I met an elderly woman in one of the wards who was being fed while having major difficultiy breathing. The doctor in charge explained to me that they were going to discharge her from the centre that day because she no longer had the virus in her system, but because she still needed medical attention, she was going to be transferred to the Conaught hospital. He explained that the virus had severely damaged her lungs and she could no longer breathe without being given oxygen. About a week later, I joined a review meeting being held at Conaught and one of the cases of people who had died the previous day that was being reviewed was that of this same woman who had been discharged from the treatment centre a few days earlier. I knew it was her because of the description given by the doctor of the cause of her death, Her death, like several other people I knew about, was not reported as a COVID death.
I wonder if something similar is happening with the corpses found on the streets of Freetown recently that were declared natural deaths. I hope next time we are told that several people have died on the streets from natural causes, we will be told what these natural causes are.
Incidentally this has reminded me of a fundamental principle in public relations which could be stated as follows: “don’t say something is white when it is black if you are not dealing with a group of blind people”
Now let me get on to the issue I really want to talk about today as captured in the title of this article. Kush is a symptom, not the disease. What do I mean by this? Kush is simply the latest manifestation of a deep seated problem we have in Sierra Leone: drug abuse and addiction. And it did not start today or even yesterday. Many of us seem to have forgotten that the civil war in this country was characterised by widespread drug abuse by combatants, among other vices. We established a National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (NCDDR), but this did not include trauma counselling and detoxification of combatants and their victims. Apart from marijuana, young people got hooked onto hard drugs like cocaine, LSD, heroine, then graduated to crack cocaine, all the time looking for a substance that will give them the greatest high for the least money and along comes kush.
Kush first started being imported into the country as finished product until some innovative hard drug chemists decided that they could manufacture more potent products by adding a variety of toxic substances to the concoction. Because the new drug was much more potent than marijuana and significantly cheaper than drugs like cocaine or heroine, many of those already into the use of drugs and many new entrants got hooked onto kush not realising that its potency was due to its toxicity. And so if they keep using it for long enough, they end up dead due to one or more of their vital organs being destroyed.
Incidentally, have you noticed that the gangs and cliques that had become a growing menace, a few years ago seem to have somehow just faded away? Could it be that many of those who made up these cliques, who were generally involved in drug abuse, graduated to Kush and have either died or been incapacitated or severely weakened making the cliques non functional? If that is the case, then perhaps in a cynical way, we have something to thank Kush for.
Anyway, here we are with a Kush epidemic, a national anti drugs task force in a declared State of Emergency trying to solve the problem. All efforts seem to be focussed on law enforcement to break the supply chain and rehabilitation of victims. While these are critical to reduce the use of Kush and other addictive drugs, these are short term measures and do nothing to address the fundamental problem. In other words, we are treating the symptom and not the disease itself. We may succeed in getting rid of Kush from Sierra Leone, we may reduce the number of young people dying from “natural causes” on the streets, but if we don’t deal with the causes of drug addiction, some other drug will replace Kush after a while, or Kush itself may come back. In other words, if we don’t make enough effort to reduce the demand for these addictive drugs, there will always be supply. It’s simple economics.
In part 2 of this article, I will share my views on the causes of drug addiction in Sierra Leone and what needs to be done to address it.