By Gom Mirian
No fewer than 14.3 million Nigerians between the ages of 16 to 65 use drugs, and one in every five persons who have used drugs experience a drug use disorder, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has said.
The chairman/chief executive officer of NDLEA, Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa (retd) made this statement in Abuja on Monday at a conference in preparation to mark the 2023 United Nations drug day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Trafficking tagged: “People First: Stop Stigma and Discrimination, Strengthen Prevention.”
Marwa, who was represented by the agency’s Secretary, Mr. Shadrach Haruna, lamented the high rate of reluctance by drug users to seek treatment. He blamed this behaviour on stigmatisation and discrimination by members of society, which has detrimental socioeconomic effects on both the individual and their family.
He said: “Stigmatisation and discrimination make recovery and reintegration difficult for drug-dependent users who submit themselves to treatment. And the prevalence of such an attitude is counterproductive to the effort, time, and resources invested by governments, institutions, and corporate bodies working to contain the drug problem.
“This is what this year’s theme is about. We must rid ourselves of any bias against those who are drug-dependent to be able to support, expedite, and make permanent their recovery. The theme will serve as an impetus for us to make a collective effort to break down these invincible but formidable social barriers that undermine the attainment of the goal of a drug-free society.”
He continued by saying that the agency had detained 31,675 drug offenders, including 35 barons; successfully prosecuted and convicted 5,147 of them; over 11,000 other cases were still pending in court; and in the past two years, 23,725 drug users had been counseled and rehabilitated, the majority of them through brief interventions.
The country’s Representative, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Dr. Oliver Stolpe, who noted that World Drug Day means an opportunity to take stock of efforts made, as well as to determine priorities in the coming year, said there is a need to improve on the availability of treatment capacity to meet the high number of Nigerians suffering from drug disorder.
“This year’s celebration is significant with the ushering in of a new government as we are going be setting in place policies that will determine in the next four years in terms of prevention, treatment, and everything that had to do with the effort to improve drug control and to make sure that we take our society from the menace of drug use disorder.
“We need to further improve on the availability of treatment capacity, at the last count we had around 2,500 treatment centers for people suffering from severe to acute disorders and therefore requiring medical interventions that in comparison to the numbers of millions of people living with drug disorder in Nigeria is still far too little,” he added.
