HARDLY five minutes pass without either Christina or Savannah Madamombe (pictured) of Mubatirapamwe Trust (MT) receiving a phone call from a desparate parent or guardian seeking help on behalf of a drug-addicted child.
Crystal meth, in particular, is destroying the lives of many Zimbabwean youths countrywide.
Christina and Savannah have seen how drugs have destroyed many youths and exposed young girls to gang rape and other forms of violence. They shared their experiences with The NewsHawks’ Chippa Gonditii (CP), raising the alarm over a drug menace that is spreading even to rural areas. Below are excerpts of the interview:
CP: Tell us what you do and the motivation behind your work.
MT: We are community organisers, and I think it’s every human being’s responsibility to try and find solutions for what is wrong in the community.
But we started this initiative because we have a brother who is a great musician. He called us and said we have a problem in the community; our lives as youths are being destroyed and someone has to do something. So he then proceeded to show us what was going on in St Mary’s Chitungwiza because he is also affected by this (drug abuse).
We decided to do a documentary, so when we got there he introduced us to girls as young as 13 and young men from 16 who are affected by drugs. He said if you cannot do something we cannot get out of this. When we got into St Mary’s, he showed me something very interesting.
There are places which they call bases and he started showing me around these tiny little rooms where people are spending up to 10 days stuck there smoking crystal meth.
I asked people if they knew what this drug was and people did not know. My brother had done research about it but initially when he got into it he did not know. My brother is a musician and sometimes they record all night long so someone introduced him to the drug that time so that he could stay awake all night whilst recording, so that’s how he got hooked to crystal meth.
So, we saw the despair of these people in the dens. They wanted to come out, but did not have the ability to do so. What surprised me is that these were not people who would be considered your typical drug users, because usually people who do drugs are supposedly considered as useless people in the community, or vagabonds. But when we met these six people, they were actually people who were worth something in life.
CP: From your experience in dealing with drug addicts, how widespread would you say the problem is?
MT: It’s a pandemic because we have people calling from every part of this country, even as far as Gwanda, Mhangura and very remote farming areas.
If we are talking about Harare, there is not even a single place where you will not find it, from the ghettos to the suburbs.
Depending on the area, in the ghetto the drug there is crystal meth and in the northern suburbs like Borrowdale and Mabelreign it’s interchangeably cocaine and crystal meth.
In the nightclubs, they are using it and it is also being used in the popular smoking device called shisha and people are actually being spiked in shishas. And they are also being spiked in drinks via the tablet form of the drug. The problem with crystal meth is that you only have to hit it once for you to get hooked and some are even going to the extent of inserting the tablet form of crystal meth into their rectum.
CP: What would you say is influencing people using these drugs in the remote areas?
MT: To answer this, we have to start with the information we are getting from the cities. Most parents started noticing a problem with their children during the first lockdown.
So, it gives us a reference point as to when the spread started. When you talk to the kids, they tell you they had so much time and had nothing to do.
So, they ended up hanging out with people who introduced them to things that they did not understand. Now that they are in, the drug peddlers will continue to push and parents are taking their kids to the rural areas thinking that they won’t have access to the drug, but they will find it and even become the suppliers there.
CP: What age group would you say is mainly affected by these drugs?
MT: From 13 years to up to 30, that’s the majority. However, we have other people we are dealing with who are between 30 and 45.
CP: How prevalent is this drug among women and the girl child in Zimbabwe?
MT: It is very prevalent because the majority of people we are dealing with are young girls. And we recently bumped into one of the girls I was looking for in Chitungwiza, she is 18 and already taking care of her two-year-old child.
She took me to her house and we found out that no one is taking care of her child and we could see that her child was malnourished. She pleaded with us to help her. So, we took this young mother for assessment at the hospital were she was advised to check into detoxification rehabilitation.
CP: A common belief about drug abuse is that it only affects boys and men who would have interacted with the wrong crowd. Is that so?
MT: There is a common misconception that people who are doing drugs are hanging out with the wrong crowd and that is why there is this stigmatisation.
People tend to think those who are into drugs are useless people. Some of the young people we are dealing with were doing law and computer engineering at universities and so on.
Universities are some of the places that are coming out constantly where kids, including the girl child, are getting hooked. Kids can become experimental and, if you look at most places, they do not have any recreational facilities, leading to them engaging in drugs.
Some of the kids are being introduced to these drugs as study enhancers; however, they are only ending up as addicts.
CP: What happens at drug bases?
MT: Most of the kids we are dealing with say when they go to these drug dens they get stuck in the sense that most of them do not have the capacity to buy these drugs because it’s an expensive drug.
In Chitungwiza, they are charging US$13 per gramme for crystal meth so there will be 13 people who contribute a dollar each and smoke together, but they do not leave that place until that gramme is finished.
When someone takes meth, they become high and they say the high is a 1 000% amplification of normal feelings. This is due to a pleasure hormone called dopamine which is released by the brain.
The first time they do crystal meth, it can be so intense that the feeling lasts for hours, but the next time they hit they are not going to get that same intensity so every time they take the drug the effect will get less and less.
So, they continue taking hit after hit and they can take days in those dens.
CP: How have parents been affected?
MT: Drug users become angry, violent and they get what is called drug-induced psychosis. They become paranoid, since drugs make a person unreasonable.
They end up causing fights with parents, they also drop out of school both from high school and all the universities in Zimbabwe.
We were actually talking to a parent who told us she had been recently hospitilised because of high blood pressure after realising that her son had dropped out of school due to crystal meth.
There was also another case where a parent complained that her son was relieving himself in cooking pots and storing the pots under his bed.
The other worry that parents highlighted is that their children who are drug users end up stealing things in the house so as to support their habit. So, this puts a mental strain on the parent.
CP: Can you explain the process which goes behind rehabilitating someone who has been using drugs?
MT: The first thing we do as Mubatirapamwe is help in family intervention. This is a process where we help the family to come together with the child because when someone is using drugs there is a chance that they are no longer on talking terms with their family.
We then proceed to offer counselling for the child and counselling for the whole family so that they understand the dangers posed by these drugs.
When counselling them, we also advise them to seek psychiatric help for their children at the hospital. From then on, it depends on what the psychiatrist says, be it hospitalisation or isolation.
As Mubatirapamwe we are also advocating home-based care where we have introduced a sober buddy who will induce sober living.
Once hooked, it is difficult to kick the addiction to crystal meth, but it is possible with assistance. So those who want to leave the drug need isolation because the access to drugs and friends is limited.
CP: What is the success rate in rehabilitating people addicted to crystal meth?
MT: This drug became common around 2018, so ever since we started doing this, we have rehabilitated some children whom we are still assessing.
At the moment they are still in isolation, some have been in isolation for three months and some six months, it all really depends on the stage at which they were with the addiction.
The success stories will be there because some are even talking of going back to school and being re-integrated into society so for us this is actually counted as success.
CP: How can the government intervene to help end the drug menace?
MT: This is a very big crisis and just like other crises like HIV and Covid-19, government should chip in and help. We as Mubatirapamwe Trust have raised the alarm, but without the government in it we are just fire fighting.
Government could chip in by turning some of the old buildings into rehabilitation centres because existing rehabilitation centres are not enough to cater for the ever-growing number of people addicted to crystal meth.
