The President of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, has declared a national emergency on substance abuse following calls on his government to crack down on the rising use of a cheap and sometimes deadly synthetic drug known as kush.
Bio announced the national emergency in a late night address on Thursday, deploring what he described as “the destructive consequences of kush on our country’s very foundation: our young people.”
The highly addictive mix of marijuana, tentanyl and tramadol has caused hundreds of deaths and psychiatrically damaged scores of users since it first appeared in Sierra Leone around four years ago, according to the government.
Bio called the drug a “death trap” and said it posed an “existential crisis”.
One of the drug’s many ingredients is human bones – security has been tightened in cemeteries to stop addicts digging up skeletons from graves.
There are no official figures on the exact number of deaths.
The President noted that a national task force on substance abuse – involving all sectors of society and supervised by a presidential advisory team – would be constituted to implement a five-step strategy for what he called a drug-free future.
Kush’s low price makes it accessible to disillusioned, unemployed youth in Sierra Leone, where around a quarter of the population lives in poverty. The drug is also found in the neighboring West African nation of Liberia.
Local communities have urged the government to address the scourge and help them deal with drug users.
The head of Sierra Leone’s only psychiatric hospital, Abdul Jalloh, commended Bio’s declaration, describing it as a crucial step towards tackling drug use.
