THE GUARDIAN
As the country struggles to curb drug abuse through the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), and other stakeholders, the need to see the menace as a public health problem that must be approached with a measure of humanity, rather than treating it purely as a criminal matter dominated discourse recently when the world marked the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. PAUL ADUNWOKE writes.
Drug addict turned advocate, David Folaranmi, a 2007 graduate of economics is one of Nigeria’s lucky drug survivors.
With his first contact with hard drugs being in his alma mater – Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, he recalled that a few students of his ilk used the then uncompleted library complex as a binging ground where they experimented with psychotropic substances.
Folaranmi, however, managed to navigate his way through the university without getting addicted and thereafter headed to the United Kingdom for a master’s degree in 2010.
“I shared a flat with two Europeans and I experienced debauchery on another level,” the drug advocate went down memory lane, adding, “Sometimes they will do drugs for weeks without stepping out of the house. So I began experimenting with mushrooms, MDMA, ketamine, and marijuana. I did the occasional lines of coke too. I came to Nigeria in August 2011 for a wedding and that was when the real issue started. A friend of mine (another CU graduate) introduced me to crack cocaine and that was the beginning of seven years of chronic addiction. …
I spent up all of my savings in millions, and sold my car, at a time I was instrumental in the sale of my mum’s house in an estate in Abuja to help pay my drug use debts, I was in an out of rehab but I didn’t get better at some point I was living in the bunk (drug houses). I lost three friends to drug overdoses (including a CU graduate). This was unfathomable by many who knew me from childhood because I was born to fervent Christian parents in the winners family, dedicated at a young age by Bishop Oyedepo, I started preaching at age 6 and was leading the home cell at age 8.”
He narrated further: “In August of 2017, l attempted suicide by drinking poison and bleach. It was a lethal dose, I had written my suicide note and said my goodbyes in it, but then very unexpectedly my younger brother came home and saw me foaming from my mouth, clutching my stomach, then he saw the note, he and my mum immediately rushed me to the hospital.”
Unlike the stigmatisation that most in his shoes face in society, Folaranmi was not only spared such treatment, but he was also saved from the jaws of avoidable death, embraced, nursed to good health, and steered back to normal life by his very caring, loving and supportive family.
What Folaranmi enjoyed en route to shaking off the unhealthy choice that he made as a young person, is the theme of this year’s International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking World, which goes thus: “People First: Stop Stigma and Discrimination, Strengthen Prevention.”
