Codeine abuse spreads among Kano women
Jummai (not real name) has spent two months hanging out around a hotel located near Kano airport before men of the state Hisbah Board picked her up. While at their office, the 18-year-old confessed to being three months pregnant and admitted using cough syrup containing codeine to get ‘slow’. The Shari’ah law enforcement officers […]
Jummai (not real name) has spent two months hanging out around a hotel located near Kano airport before men of the state Hisbah Board picked her up. While at their office, the 18-year-old confessed to being three months pregnant and admitted using cough syrup containing codeine to get ‘slow’.
The Shari’ah law enforcement officers said the teenager was apprehended after investigations had shown that she was wandering around the hotel, apparently waiting for ‘customers’. Jummai, however, claimed that she was there for a different mission.
She left her hometown of Kazaure in Jigawa State for about two months and relocated to Kano, to evade her parents’ nagging as she claimed. While at Kano, the secondary school leaver was being accommodated by her two girl friends within the airport’s authorities quarters.
While they remain indoors in the day, they go out to meet their boyfriends at night. She has since stopped seeing the man who impregnated her, but a ‘good Samaritan’ she met around the hotel was offering to help her out.
So, not as the Hisbah officials were suspecting, Jummai said she was out at hotel on the morning of her arrest to meet the man, who was going to help her abort the pregnancy. “Everything was finalized and I was only waiting for him to come and take me to the doctor who was going to remove it when the Hisbah turned up and asked me to follow them,” she explained. The arrest has saved the child.
Jummai who was not forthcoming initially with answers, later relaxed and opened up more about herself as well as the company she was keeping.
Neither the teenager’s parents nor her acquaintances knew that she has fled to Kano, though she has a craving to return home before the Ramadan – and that is precisely after the pregnancy must have been terminated.
The teenager revealed that she was introduced to drugs by her female friends at a school in Kazaure. Although she stopped a month after taking in, she recalled gulping varieties of cough syrups containing codeine.
On how the substances made her feel, Jummai gave a faint smile before uttering ‘slow’, but the two other teens harbouring her are stiil on it, she said. “One of them always falls sick any day she did not take cough syrup with codeine. On average, she takes five bottles a day,” she revealed.
Jummai went further to disclose that the price of the substances varies according to brands, stating that the highly intoxicating ones cost N700 per bottle, while others are available for just N500.
Before she quit the drug, the lady recalled that her main supplier was a man residing at Bachirawa quarters in Kano, called ‘Chairman’.
Malama Zahara’u Muhammad Umar, Hisbah Board’s deputy Commander General, said Jummai was the second teenager brought to her office with pregnancy and drug abuse cases within a week. “That has been the trend. Most of these ladies we get who are taking cough syrups are also pregnant.”
The woman commander said it is difficult to say the exact number of female drug addicts who are caught by the board every week. “There was a lady I sat here and counseled for a long time against abusing drugs. When she left my office, she asked the guard escorting her ‘please oga that woman who was talking to me, what did she say? I’m high, so I did not understand a single word she said’,” narrated Malama Zahara’u.
She maintained that she can detect drug abusers from signs in their eyes, mouth and tongue as well as through their behaviour.
Cases of drug abuse are not strange in Kano, a state that has been consistently rated as the first for two in number of drug abuse throughout the country by the National Drugs Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA). What is new, as Weekly Trust checks showed, is the growing trend of high consumption of drugs, especially cough syrups mixed with codeine – a drug that is used to reduce pain.
“It is scaring,” said Zahara’u. “What is more frightening about it is that we arrest more of female drug abusers than male. Most of the people brought here are female and they usually come here dazed. So you have to wait until they sleep for a day and regain their senses before you can debrief them,” the commander added.
Weekly Trust findings also indicated that the abuse of substances in the state is not just peculiar with ‘street’ girls like Jummai, as the vice has found ‘religious’ acceptance among married women, as well as secondary and primary school girls.
Also in vogue, is the free use of codeine and cough syrups as intoxicants at women gatherings, especially during wedding ceremonies or parties. “Even women in kulle (purdah) do it,” said NDLEA commander in Kano State, Sumaila Ethan. “But they don’t go and buy it themselves, they use fronts.”
Zahara’u gave an insight into how the fronts are used, explaining that a married woman could give money to a neighbour and beg him to take his child to a patent medicine seller and lie of sickness, just to get her the drugs. Some of the drugs are sold by fellow women, she said.
A secondary school teacher, who does not want to be named, told Weekly Trust that three female students had to be expelled recently from a girls secondary school in Giginyu. According to the tutor, one of the students was fond of sleeping during classes and when she was investigated, other teachers discovered she was taking cough syrup mixed with codeine.
After much interrogation, the girl who was in SS2 named two junior students in the school to be her accomplice. “Further investigations later revealed that the girl picked the habit from her mother, who was said to be an unrepentant junkie,” he said, adding that the two other girls were equally expelled.
“Women mix these drugs in drinks during ceremonies and share it among themselves. The goal is to get them tipsy and give them courage to dance and talk vulgar,” explains the Hisbah commander. The officer further said primary school children as young as 12 have been brought before her for abusing cough syrups.
But she warned that parents should be cautious of their daughters who don’t go out of the home at all, but receive visitors and sleep always. “What we have found out about such ladies is that, they may be home and sleeping all the time, giving their parents reasons for joy that their daughters are good. But that may not be so, as it is common with such ladies to be getting such syrups from their female friends who visit carrying handbags and sometimes join them to sleep.”
Weekly Trust gathered that the easiest way to get such drugs by the users is at the uncontrolled medicine market inside Sabon Gari market. There, people can go and buy large quantities of the substances to supply to end users in different parts of the state. “It was reported to me last year that some youths went and bought 12 cartons of cough syrups containing codeine at the Sabon Gari market which they reportedly used for celebrating Sallah festivity after the Ramadan fast,” said the chairman of the Pharmaceutical Association of Nigeria in Kano, Pharmacist Ahmad Gana Muhammad.
The chairman described the drugs section of the market as a place where the sale of medicines is not regulated, citing a situation where someone who has no shop therein, brought cartons of cough syrup, dumped them on the ground and started selling.
Not long ago, Governor Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, has to plead with drug manufacturers, through the state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Abubakar Labaran Yusuf, to reduce the quantity of the substance, because it is the drug that is much abused by youths.
The governor, who observed that the level of abuse of the drugs has become worrisome, lamented that pharmaceutical manufacturers within and outside the state have introduced the drug into their product lines. He further urged the manufacturers to resist the temptation of accumulating more wealth through the manufacture of the drug, because according to him, if they do that it would be at the detriment of the lives of the teeming youths who have become addicts.
But the phenomenal rise of codeine use among youths, including ladies, should also be blamed on parents, according to Malama Zahara’u. “The biggest cause of rampant cases of drug abuse in our society today can be linked to the failure of parents to understand their role as guardians of their children. Only a few know this. It baffles me whenever I tell a father that his daughter is into drugs and he tells me, ‘you see, I have nothing to do with her’,” she stated.
The commander disclosed that some of the drug users get money to fund their habits by blackmailing famous politicians. “A lady was brought here and she told me that she was too big to take cough syrup. ‘I take cocaine,’ she boasted. Some of them are beautiful, so they will go to a prominent politician and lure him into an affair. The moment he succumbs, they will record him on video and threaten to release it unless he settles them with handsome amount,” she disclosed.
Pharmacist Gana, who is also a member of the state task force on drugs, agreed that a wide range of drugs is abused daily in the state, but he, however, noted that the state government is making efforts to eliminate the menace.
He pointed out that government set up a drug abuse committee and has received its report, stressing that it should not delay implementation of the recommendations in the report. He said this is important because the rate of drug abuse in the state has assumed an ‘alarming’ proportion. “I am aware that girls, in secondary schools and universities and married women are involved in taking these substances.”
He said factors that could be responsible for the menace are pressures from the society, which some people think they can run away from by using drugs. He, however, warned that abusing drugs could be dangerous to health. “They can lead one to crime or cause illness,” he said.
He said his association is talking to manufacturers of the drugs, adding that the move is already yielding results, as some of them had suspended production of the substances. But the pharmacist called on government to regulate activities of drug sellers, especially the ones in the Sabon Gari market.
Gana further believes that legislation criminalizing abuse of cough syrups was overdue.
Similarly, Mr. Ethan, argued that without enabling laws, the agency cannot check abuse of the drug in the society, saying the body is presently handicapped. “You can go to the chemist and tell them you want cough syrup and they will give you. They are not illicit drugs,” he explained.
Ethan further explained that consumption of cough syrups is destroying the productive segment of the society, being that the major culprits are youths.
While he prayed that the relevant laws in the country should be amended to take care of the problem, the commander said all his agency can do against the serious menace for now is to counsel both sellers and users of the drugs on it ills.
He equally praised the state government for finding jobs many of youths, saying that can help ameliorate the problem.
Speaking, NAFDAC Deputy Director of Public Relations, Abubakar Jimoh, said: “NAFDAC is helping to address the issue of codeine cough syrup abuse in the market by reducing the quantity of codeine that is to be imported into Nigeria. Before now, the NAFDAC allows the import of 3, 400 kilograms into Nigeria, but from last year to this year the total permits issued by NAFDAC was 1, 200 kilograms. This is about 70 per cent reduction in quantity. Thus, we expect that the quantity that is in circulation will be 70 per cent less than it used to be. We believe that if the syrup is not available, people would not find it to buy and abuse.
“But NAFDAC is aware that where you ban such things you as a regulator sees such things within the purview of your own actions. You extrapolate and say this is what will happen, but what happens in reality is also different. People can smuggle this things. So we realize that the next thing to follow up on is to carry out social re-orientation of the people through public awareness programmes, through advocacy and meetings that will get the society into the fight against drug abuse. In line with this our drug abuse campaign unit has formulated a sustainable programme that will involve political leaders, religious leaders and civil society organizations so as to come out with effective messages that will be passed on to the people. NAFDAC has written the Kano State government on this and the state government has accepted the idea. So, NAFDAC has set up a tripartite committee involving NAFDAC, NDLEA and the Kano State government to address this problem.”
“Today, NAFDAC does not grant permits unless importers render accounts of how they used their last imports. NAFDAC has set up a team to do a national assessment of all the drugs that are abusive or addictive in nature so that Nigeria will know what the country needs and that is the only thing we will allow to be imported into the country.
“There is a paradigm shift in drug abuse. Now it is not only the elitist drugs like cocaine that is in circulation, but other drugs like cannabis and codeine have become prevalent. NAFDAC through its enforcement activities had found out that students in campuses abuse codeine by mixing it with drinks during parties. In the past it used to be Ogogoro. In places like Benue, for example, Ogogoro abuse was so pervasive that they were selling it in sachets called recharge cards. But NAFDAC’s work with the Benue State government in the last one and a half years has reduced the circulation of Ogogoro. Now people are shifting to codeine in the far north. Even if you tackle codeine, there is every chance that drug addicts will find new substances to use, because the habit has turned into an addiction.”