Tuesday, 28 May 2013

The Mukuru slow killer

By Suleiman Chacha




Mukuru slums are home to over 600,000 people. Almost 85% of this population is youths. With high levels of unemployment in these slums and the country at large, many people operate small-scale businesses selling vegetables and fruits or hawking various items but capital to start these businesses has also become a major setback. Most of the families live below a dollar a day or worse still go to bed on an empty stomach.

 
With low earnings or none at all to feed themselves and their families, this fellow human beings look to other means for survival. They engage in vices such as prostitution, begging in the streets, robberies and drugs and substance abuse. Some even sell drugs to their fellow slum dwellers just to make ends meet.

Drug abuse has hit Mukuru Slums like wildfire. While it is assumed youths in these over populated Mukuru Slums engage themselves in drug abuse knowingly, a step in the shoes of a Mukuru resident gives you a totally different story. Most engage in drug abuse unknowingly. How? You may wonder. Relax and let us give you the inside story.

                                                        

Cannabis, bhang, ganja, weed, marijuana, call it whatever name you want to call it, is a preparation of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug and as medicine. Contemporary uses of cannabis are as a recreational or medicinal drug, and as part of religious or spiritual rites; the earliest recorded uses date from the 3rd millennium BC. In 2004, the United Nations estimated that global consumption of cannabis indicated that approximately 4% of the adult world population (162 million people) used cannabis annually, and that approximately 0.6% (22.5 million) of people used cannabis daily.

 Since the early 20th century cannabis has been subject to legal restrictions with the possession, use, and sale of cannabis preparations containing psychoactive cannabinoids currently illegal in most countries of the world; the United Nations has said that cannabis is the most-used illicit drug in the world.
                                                                              
In Mukuru slums its common to find people smoking bhang especially the youths and in fact the natural plant has been smoked since time immemorial but beware bhang smokers in Mukuru Slums, there is a new trend in town.

Due to unemployment and desperation to make ends meet, some scrupulous individuals have derived scrupulous means to make an extra living out of the poor in the poverty stricken Mukuru slums by addicting them to drugs without their knowledge. how you may ask?

This greedy, selfish, uncaring, individuals mix sedatives with dry bhang leaves and make small bhang rolls the size of cigarettes which they sell cheaply to unsuspecting youths in the slums. One roll goes for 20ksh while the most expensive goes for 50ksh.

                                              

While the youth languishes in drugs and substance abuse without their knowledge, the peddlers get rich and richer. the more they inhale the more addicted they become and its only a matter of time before they become useless and a liability to the community.

These peddlers are scattered like sand all over the Mukuru slums and they are out with a mission, to addict as many youths as possible and they are speaking same business language.

''Its really bad. The habit is spreading like wildfire and more and more youths are getting hooked to drugs without their knowledge. This thing is killing the future of Mukuru and we must do something to curb this menace that's why we as Footprints Community Development Volunteerism are working together with Mukuru Slum News to create awareness and ensure that this stops,'' said Isaac Okumu co-founder FCDV http://www.fcdv.org/home/index.php?flag=home

While the whole country is engulfed in the insecurity uprising, we should not neglect this issue that is slowly claiming the lives of able bodied youths in the slums who can make a difference. We at Mukuru Slum News want to urge all NGOs and other interested parties and stakeholders to come join hands together and create awareness about drugs and substance abuse and make sure we eradicate this disease that is slowly crippling the future of Mukuru and our great nation as a whole.

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