Foot dragging as junkies are ‘drugged’ to graves

His face anxious and driven by an irrepressible urge for “the thing”, John Karisa, 24, lifts the syringe loaded with a whitish liquid to his right biceps. For a few seconds, a grimace creases his face as he pokes his skin with a needle, rendered blunt by overuse.

John is the face of a tragedy that is unfolding in Mombasa and other costal tourist havens.

Finally the spike finds its mark and starts to channel the syringe’s contents into his bloodstream. The grimace slowly melts, turning into a broad smile as an extraordinary calm sweeps over him.

He leans back, the needle still stuck in his arm, and savours the momentary sense of being “high”, in the drug user’s lingo, before reaching over to pluck it out.

Around him, his colleagues — both male and female — in various stages of intoxication go about their business unabashed. A number of them chat idly as one or two prepare another dose of the heroin for those who want to have another round.

Depending on the length of time one has been a user, the state of “highness” varies — three hours for the seasoned users and as long as a day for the beginners.

Karisa explains that a dose doled out on the nail of his little finger is enough to make him stay “high” for at least three hours.

“Drugs have definitely become part of our body system and we cannot do without them. We don’t even fear the police or dread contracting diseases any more,” he says, adding that he left his wife and child for a shot (excuse the pun) at the drug dens of Mombasa.

The damage the habit has visited on his body is evident. From his shaggy, shabby clothing to his scaling skin and broken teeth, he looks like a man twice his age.Karisa has tried several times to drop the habit with little success. His preferred daily dose is heroin, but whenever he can afford it, he can never let the chance pass to get the more potent cocaine.

Shocked sense out of me

“I was introduced to drugs by my best friend, who died after taking too much cocaine. That shocked the sense out of me, but I haven’t been able to stop using this ‘thing’,” he says, still in a daze from his last shot.

Karisa’s is, by all means, a sordid tale, the harrowing story of struggle and defeat, and more struggle. Unfortunately, it is not exclusive to him. The streets of Mombasa crawl with emaciated men and, lately, women, who would sell the clothes on their backs to get that fleeting “high”.

The tragedy is that, although the drug dens are always “open” to the public, the police seem unable to crush the drug rings.

Religious leaders in Mombasa recently threatened to expose a group of “foreigners” and local residents whom they accused of importing the drugs that have turned thousands into zombies.

This is a war that has for long been waged with little success. The courts, for example, are known to grant suspects bail, a loophole the criminals use to escape the country and, hence, evade justice.

It is estimated that there are thousands of drug addicts across the country, with Nairobi and Mombasa bearing the brunt of the menace.
And, as the country dilly-dallies about what to do to stop the rich criminals responsible for the mess, those hooked on their wares continue to wallow in helplessness, devising ways to get an ever quicker, more efficient “high”.

Anti-drug abuse organisations have reported cases where addicts inject the venom into their necks and genitals in the hope that the high blood circulation in these areas will reduce the time needed to get to the clouds.

Karisa, for example, says the veins in his arms have almost collapsed and are not easy to get after years of drug use. Those in the neck and the genitals will, however, clearly stand out when stimulated, and are always ready recipients of the drug cocktail.

Karisa admits that he cannot perform any job without a dose of heroin fuelling his system... and that does not come cheaply since one dose of the kill-me-slowly powder costs Sh400.

“I used to work as a casual labourer but since I started taking drugs, I spend more than 10 hours in these dens, where we live as a family,” he says.

And when the pocket does not allow him to buy a dose, he uses a syringe to draw blood from a fellow junkie who is already high, then pumps the blood into his own system.

The menace has ensnared the young and the old alike, with girls as young as 16 hooked on various forms of drugs.

“My parents would get the shock of their lives if they discovered that I’m hooked to this stuff,” one of the girls we spoke to, and who requested that we do not publish her identity, said.

“This started as a joke, but now I’m hooked. I prefer to inject my thighs because they are a bit hidden. Nowadays I do not wear skirts at all.”

Drug use and trafficking has been linked to politicians and top government officials at the coast, but no one has come out clearly to say who is involved. Efforts by human rights organisations to push the police to act on the suspects have continually hit a deadlock, with the traffickers being suspected of colluding with senior police officers to defeat the law.

Raids on drug dens are a regular event at the coast, but residents claim that they are just a public relations exercise by police to fool the public that the war is on.

The only people arrested are usually the hapless addicts, not their suppliers and the other bigwigs in the distribution chain.
In the various drug zones that the Nation team visited, residents claimed that security officers make daily rounds during which they collect bribes from “pushers” and promise to look the other way.

List of shame

Sheikh Juma Ngao, a director of the National Agency for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse (Nacada), says that more than 40,000 youths in Coast Province abuse drugs, and that Mombasa leads in the list of shame with about 24,000 addicts.

Sheikh Ngao says that, according to a survey conducted early this year, heroin and cocaine are the most widely abused drugs, followed by bhang. He adds, there are plans to declare the drug menace a national disaster and pass laws to help wipe out the trade in the country.

“Countries like China, South Korea, and Sudan introduced the death sentence as punishment for anyone found using or selling any illicit drug,” he says. “That move alone proved a deterrent, and drug use in these countries has been on the decline.”

Sheikh Ngao accuses police of laxity in sealing the porous borders through which drugs are sneaked into the country, and says investigations have shown that the more potent commodities such as cocaine and heroin are smuggled in from Pakistan and Afghanistan through the Mombasa seaport and airports across the country.

According to Sheikh Ngao, the drugs are stored in posh houses in Kizingo and Nyali before being distributed to the consumers in the low-class regions of Shimanzi, Madhubaa (near the Coast General Hospital), Bokole (Mombasa mainland), Mishimoroni, and along the beaches.

An initiative by Mombasa women under the union Defence Drugs, led by Ms Zainabu Hassan, is on the ground at the Magodoroni area, a haven for about 500 drug users. But their efforts seem to be bearing no fruit, at least not in the short term.

“Most of the users blame unemployment for their woes, and accuse the police of laxity in dealing with the main traffickers,” says Ms Hassan, and calls on the government to build more rehabilitation centres at the coast to help those affected.

“It is a pity that, although Mombasa is the capital of the drug world, we have only three rehabilitation centres,” she says.

Sheikh Mohammed Khalifah, the secretary general of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya, recently stormed the Mombasa Airport police station, where he offered to give a list of the aeroplanes that were ferrying drugs into the country. He accused the police of being compromised to look the other way.

But Mombasa police boss Tom Odero says it is difficult to beat the addicts and the traffickers at their game, and that the nature of their “occupation” poses numerous challenges to the force.

“Traditionally, it has been the men who engage in the drug business. But women have now jumped on the bandwagon. We have deployed more female officers on the ground to help us police that hitherto overlooked segment,” he says.