Where youths smoke bhang to keep evil spirits at bay

• Weed has become a nagging problem in Taita where many have become zombies

The battle against use of bhang among the Taita is losing ground due to certain beliefs about the powers of the weed.

Apparently, Taita residents believe that the cultivation, marketing and consumption of bhang wards off evil spirits among the community.

This belief is hampering the fight against the illicit trade and increasing the number of bhang traffickers in the larger Taita to an alarming level. A number of consumers of this drug have been turned into zombies.

After intensified crackdown against the dealers by security agencies, trafficking in the forbidden crop has taken a different turn, with more women dealing in the weed.

The women have employed innovative ways of evading detection by stuffing the packed stones wrapped with banana fibre into sacks carrying omena fish, thus taking advantage of the strong smell of fish to confuse their trackers.

Some have gone a notch higher by stuffing it in the middle of bags carrying cereals and bananas, taking advantage of the weight of the cargo to escape police inspection on road check points.

Coastal towns

A bigger quantity of bhang is trafficked to Malindi and other Coastal towns from Taveta through public service vehicles.

Mwatate acts as the distribution centre where those involved in the trade supply it to their clients in other parts of the district, including Wundanyi and Voi.

Smoking of bhang is gradually taking root among students and youth in the rural areas because of belief that it has power to exorcise ghosts.

Others claim that when grown with other crops, it acts as a pesticide and prevents them from invasion by destructive pests — a claim politicians, religious leaders and administrators have dismissed as a mere ploy to justify farming the crop.

The belief is gradually taking root and drawing followers among the youthful generation who claim that it stimulates and broadens their thinking capacity.

The dramatic change in the way the drug is trafficked and stored has put the probation department and courts between a rock and a hard place when it comes to making decisions on the kind of sentences to be handed to the suspects.

A source from the probation department revealed that some of those who trade in bhang were single mothers of very young children who cannot support themselves while some were HIV positive.

“Handing custodial sentence to a HIV positive person or a mother of four or five small children would be not only dangerous to the family, but also to the inmates,” the source said.

What we have discovered is that some of them have invented a new way of storing the drugs underground on road sides where no one would suspect.

“These are women who dress so well that no one could suspect them of anything particularly when making deliveries to her retailers,” the source said.

But a number of people have dismissed these suspicions.