The Instructing Hospital supplies isolation remedy, which lasts between three to 6 weeks, and antipsychotic medicine to assist wean sufferers off their habit. However it’s the solely facility of its variety providing energetic care to kush sufferers in Sierra Leone.
Certainly, there are simply 5 psychiatrists in all the nation, house to roughly 8.4 million, based on the World Well being Organisation, making it not possible to sort out the spiralling epidemic.
Sierra Leone’s youth unemployment charge – which stands at 60 per cent, one of many highest on the earth – is additional compounding the problem, specialists say. Jobless individuals like Amara are turning to kush to be able to “escape the tough realities of life”.
“I like it,” he provides. “It makes me really feel joyful for a second, sufficient to neglect my worries and societal issues.”
As ‘harmful’ as heroin or cocaine
For some customers, kush habit can gasoline critical psychiatric points. There have additionally been reviews of individuals growing swelling and infections, resulting in open wounds on their legs, however there is no such thing as a clear medical clarification for this.
The drug also can show deadly. When excessive, customers have been recognized to bang their heads repeatedly in opposition to partitions, stroll into site visitors or fall from excessive locations. Amara has misplaced a number of of his mates and relations whereas excessive on kush, together with one who fell over and hit his head on a rock – a blow which killed him.
There isn’t a official knowledge out there for deaths associated to the drug, however well being specialists estimate round a dozen kush customers die weekly in Sierra Leone, with their our bodies usually recovered from the streets and slums.
However it’s not simply Sierra Leone which is grappling with the fallout from kush. A wave of habit is slowly shifting throughout West Africa, with the horrors of Freetown now being repeated within the city centres of Liberia and Guinea. Estimates recommend greater than 1,000,000 individuals from the area at the moment are addicted.
“Kush is a really harmful drug like heroin or cocaine, it’s sturdy, low-cost and simply out there, there’s weak regulation and management over the sale of the drug and it’s turning into widespread in West Africa,” says Dr Edward Nahim, a guide psychiatrist on the Sierra Leone Psychiatric Instructing Hospital.
“The dearth of jobs and alternatives is a driving power main many youths into drug habit after the disruption of economies by the Covid pandemic.”