Nigeria’s scourge of drug abuse is a near and present danger that is increasingly trudging towards a national emergency situation without checks, Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi, chairman of MTN Foundation Nigeria, has said, raising an alarm on the looming threat.
His warning comes on the heels of staggering statistics indicating that as much as 14.4 million Nigerians were caught in the snare of substance abuse in 2018, with very limited options of recovery available in the country.
Adelusi-Adeluyi raised concern that a lot more of Nigeria’s youth population could have slipped into addiction to substance abuse in the last 16 months that the COVID-19 pandemic crept into our lives and since the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its report on drug use in Nigeria.
“It is a fight that we believe calls for a multi-sector, multi-stakeholder approach. Together we will continue to rally at the scale of urgency required. Together we will play our part towards a drug-free nation,” the chairman said, speaking at MTN’s ‘Share Facts on Drugs, Save Lives’ programme in honour of the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.
Substance or drug use disorders, according to the American Psychiatric Association, involve patterns of symptoms resulting from the use of a substance despite experiencing problems as a result of abuse.
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The prevalence of any drug use in Nigeria as of 2017 is estimated at 14.4 percent or 14.3 million people aged between 15 and 64 years based on the UNODC report.
Drug use was most common among those who were between the ages of 25 and 39 years, up from 24 years.
One of five high-risk drug users, 80,000 users, inject drugs in Nigeria and the most common drugs injected were pharmaceutical opioids, cocaine and heroin.
Cannabis, the most abused substance, had about 10.6 million users in 2018, opioids 4.6 million, cough syrups 2.4 million and cocaine 92,000.
Unfortunately, Nigeria has a shortfall in the capacity to rescue this drowning population. There are gaps in treatment and care for people with drug use disorders as around 40 percent of abusers who report problems do not have access to such services.
In Lagos for instance, the Drug Addiction Unit of the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, can only handle 400 core cases of in-patients in a year and at least 20,800 out-patients yearly.
Half of these patients suffer drug-related problems, implying that the hospital can only manage 0.5 percent of the southwest need to address psychiatric disorders, if it was the only hospital in the zone.
The cost of treatment, stigma associated with accessing such services as well as the stigma associated with substance use in general, and availability of adequate drug treatment services were the major barriers in accessing drug treatment in Nigeria, the research shows.
The consequences vary from disruption in family lives, loss in productivity and legal problems.
