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Drug abuse: Parents should closely follow up children`s movements
2008-04-20 10:44:05
By Rayner Ngonji
Last week I was at a bus stop waiting for a commuter bus to take me to work when I noticed a 23-year-old youth behaving rather strangely. He was walking forward and back as if he was in a parade.
He was untidy and carried all features of a mental case. I didn`t notice his problem until he went to a nearby garbage heap, picked a piece of an orange refuse and started eating it.
It’s only then that onlookers including myself realized that there was something wrong with him. The way he behaved and the attire he had on convinced everybody at the bus stop that the boy was mentally disturbed.
The situation provoked a brief debate over his plight.
An elderly lady who was close to me said she was familiar with such experiences because the son of her of her brother suffers the same problem.
She said when the situation gets worse, her brother cries like a child with no alternative to tame the problem.
She says they took him to Mirembe Mental Hospital in Dodoma but it didn`t help.
``But all this is a result of drugs``, a 40-year-old man chipped in as the debate ensued.
He said 90 per cent of mental cases amongst the youths which the country faces, result from drugs.
I asked if there was anything that could be done to rescue him from further damage as the disease was just at its preliminary stage, the man who seemed to be a medical doctor said if his problem developed out of drug abuse, there was no way to help him. Available medical treatment can only temporarily control but not cure.
Drugs are good because they fetch a lot of money to the barons. But accompanying effects to the consumers who mostly constitute the youth is disastrous.
That is why the government has throughout been fighting importation (which normally is illegally carried out) and consumers.
But the war is being frustrated by the drug barons who are financially well off and are out to frustrate the government efforts of stamping drug abuse.
However, parents are supposed to closely follow up the movements of their children right from their tender age to adulthood to make sure they do not fall into the hands of the barons either as conduits or consumers.
If this approach is taken into account, the problem of drug abuse amongst the youth could be greatly reduced.
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