● Psychotropic substances hit Nigeria like a blizzard, with casualties rising
Here goes the parable of the drug-dependent: First you take a puff, then the puff takes a puff, then the puff takes you.
Even so, thousands of youths especially the silverspoon kids are addicted to hard drugs and their poetry of death; they keep chasing the dragon through those chloral hours until the highs erupt within their skulls, a tallow-coloured world of ghastly beauty.
Eventually, they awaken to a tragic reality and discover that they had simply allowed death to lure them into a narcotic reverie, a fleeting Eden of ephemeral highs from which they crash into a permanent low.
Despite the apparent dangers of drug abuse, too many Nigerian youths have lost their lives by pushing dope into their veins instead of hope into their brains.
In the past, junk was the ideal product. The ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client would crawl through a sewer and beg to buy. But nowadays, users enjoy an endless array of psychotropic substances including SK, Ecstasy, Heroin, Loud, and Cocaine.
The dam is already bursting at the seams and if left unattended to, the flood will sweep away so many ambitious youths, hapless young ladies, and impressionable silver spoon kids. This is no doomsday prophecy. Among Lagos Island’s in-crowd, for instance, the jet-set and the nouveau riche have taken to a dangerous habit; marijuana and its other derivatives have suddenly lost the allure they used to hold for many. Now, the use of ‘loud,’ cocaine, that powerfully addictive narcotic with the tendency to rid its user of all inhibitions, is the order of the day. Many Lagos clubs now serve and spike their drinks with the white powder to the pleasure of their mostly filthy rich clientele.
Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-Nigerian drug. No longer is it a sinful secret of the moneyed elite, nor merely an elusive glitter of decadence in raffish society circles, as it seemed in decades past. Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, coke is the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional, and often upwardly mobile citizens — lawyers, businessmen, students, government bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, secretaries, bankers, mechanics, real estate brokers, waitresses.
Largely unchecked by law enforcement, a veritable blizzard of white powder is blowing through the coastal city of Lagos, and it is causing significant social and economic shifts no less than a disturbing drug problem.
Aside from cocaine, other psychotropic substances have gained widespread appeal among thousands of youths enslaved to a hankering for SK, Ecstasy, Meth, Loud, to mention a few.
Once it gets into their system, they become less inhibited and more vulnerable to crime. Chindima Adaora, the controversial side chick and 300 level Mass Communication student of the University of Lagos, who got arrested for allegedly stabbing her billionaire boyfriend, Super TV boss, Usifo Ataga, to death, was reportedly high on hard drugs while committing the crime.
Despite Chidinma’s subsequent retraction of her earlier confession to the crime, her predicament and the blow-back generated in the aftermath of her crime hasn’t served as a deterrence to several young ladies and guys who still take to the use of hard drugs.
Celebrities, married and single ladies continue to indulge in the reckless use of psychotropic substances. Further findings revealed that many of them use hard drugs as aphrodisiacs and stimulants to artistry in desperate and ordinary moments of their lives.
The consequences, of course, are always better imagined.
