CALL TO ACTION: Teenagers’ and youths’ rising culture of drug abuse heightening in Lagos

This is the dream of a Lagos crack dealer: to see the sunrise daily in its silvery splendour while the city stirs to hustle while thrill-seekers pursue a new kind of “jonzing.”

His name is Kola but “customers” call him O’ngbana. At 49, O’ngbana swaggers through Ipodo like a cocky prince of the barrio. Amid the shanty in Ikeja, Lagos, he made a killing every day until COVID-19 struck, dwindling patronage to a trickle.

Business is at a scary low. A dribble here, a trickle there, makes O’ngbana very worried. “People don’t have money to eat let alone smoke crack (adulterated cocaine). But I have my loyal customers. Come rain or shine, they will always show up,” he said, and forlornly recalled the glory days of his hustle, when he made as much as N10, 000 in a day and about N50, 000 in a week, dealing crack and Indian Hemp.

Before the pandemic, O’ngbana enjoyed cozy patronage as “students, teenagers commercial sex workers, street urchins, police officers and soldiers” thronged his stall for their daily fix.

If I needed proof that On’gbana had teenagers making up a good number of both his customers and junior colleagues, I got it when I reached the hidden lab joint, where he mixed the drugs he sold.

At the extreme left of the joint, a buxom teenage girl was crushing rocks of crack and ecstasy pills into a fine powder. Skillfully, she mixed them with cannabis and dusted the powder with a plastic spoon into jars containing psychotropic brews including omi gota (Gutter Juice), colorado, pamilerin.

It was enlightening to watch the lab’s owner, Ralph work. He manned his den with studious attention. Nothing evaded him. Within the five minutes that we spent in his den, he sold N38, 000 worth of hard drugs.

O’ngbana revealed, that, having conducted due diligence on me, Ralph concluded that I wasn’t a cop hence his acceptance of my patronage. “Everybody here is wary of new faces. Nobody wants trouble from undercover drug police,” said O’ngbana.

But for all his street smarts, O’ngbana has been reduced to just a middle man, a dispensable fragment of the Ipodo drug trafficking network. “The pandemic has ruined everything. I have lost the high-level contacts that I struggled to build in the past four years. But I will get out of this place soon,” he said, vowing to join the big league in Europe and South America.

Until then, the 49-year-old would focus on getting by and staying alive. To achieve this, he keeps a mane of menacing wit and killer instinct to lionise his feeble frame against the street elements.

It’s a necessary performance of will cum survival in Ipodo, a neighbourhood brimming with drug dealers, cutthroat rivals, unforgiving henchmen, suicidal customers and corrupt law enforcers.

“These days, I have resorted to hooking customers up with dealers. This barely fetches me N3, 000 in a week,” he said, stressing that the most sensible thing he had done in recent times, was to use his earnings to acquire an “oloso” (commercial sex hawker), whom he apprenticed to a madame and Ralph, a crack dealer. Her name is Happiness and she is 14-years-old.

“I have invested over N30, 000 on her. But she is a fast learner. My friend, who is her boss said she has brought in more clients than bonafide members of his crew and the freelancers he employs to deal drugs,” said O’ngbana.

There is no gainsaying Happiness has learned to play her part; the blithesome sheaf of spunk and baby fat exchanges sex for money while simultaneously dealing crack cocaine and heroin to some of her customers.

At our first encounter, she sashayed, flailing like a rag doll bound in an extremely tight camisole and undersized skirt. Happiness hustled like a street-wise cougar. Striking a pose outside KO’s Gardens, a brothel, she canvassed for male customers promising to fulfil every fantasy and its fruits.

Soon after she emerged from her room with a customer, she sidled beside a middle-aged man sipping beer at a table by the brothel’s entrance. Happiness sat beside him teasing him with a smile.

“Some men are sick like that,” Happiness said. “Many of my customers pick me because I am a small girl and I am very good. But I know what I am doing. I hope to make enough money to buy my freedom and set up a small business,” she said.

Until then, Happiness will serve as a sex slave to O’ngbana because he “saved” her from the streets and took good care of her. For instance, at her arrival in Ipodo, he introduced her to a madame who gave her “hustle clothing” (skimpy wears) for free.  He also negotiated on her behalf, an arrangement whereby she was exempted from paying the mandatory N3, 000 daily rent of the tiny room where she sleeps with customers for money.

O’ngbana’s relationship with her is, however, guided by street wisdom. He knows he could only sell a rock of crack once to a customer or hook the latter up with a dealer for a paltry commission – and that is subject to drug demand and availability.

But he profits off Happiness multiple times a day, by pimping her off to different customers, seven or eight times a day.

A small rock of adulterated cocaine aka crack sells at N500 to N1, 000. But O’ngbana pimps Happiness to customers at N1, 500 per romp – often called three or five minutes ‘short time.’

Together with O’ngbana, the 14-year-old oils the wheels, and powers the chug chug of Ipodo’s narcotics sales engine and sex trafficking network. But teacher and student, pimp and sex worker, are mere fragments of the menacing underworld that controls and feeds Lagosians’ lust for hard drugs.

Asides hustling on the street and luring men into her dingy bed at KO’s Garden, a brothel, Happiness sells hard drugs to some of her customers. Sometimes, when business is hard, she requests a split in the cost of her sexual services, taking N1, 000 cash and between N500 to N1, 000 worth of crack. Officially, she declares N1, 500 as her earning on each customer, “But I often make more than that. Some pay me N2, 000, N3, 000. When I see complete mugu, I collect N5, 000 for short-time,” she said.

Invisible in plain sight

Happiness is simply one of several youths trapped in the rapture of hallucinogenic substances but ignored in plain sight by regulatory authorities. Between 2018 and 2019, nearly 15% of Nigeria’s adult population (around 14.3 million people) reported a “considerable level” of use of psychotropic drug substances, a rate much higher than the 2016 global average of 5.6% among adults.

The survey was led by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Centre for Research and Information on Substance Abuse with technical support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and funding from the European Union.

It showed the highest levels of drug use was recorded among people aged between 25 to 39, with cannabis being the most widely used drug. Sedatives, heroin, cocaine and the non-medical use of prescription opioids were also noted. The survey excluded the use of tobacco and alcohol.

While a former research revaled that 65 percent of high school students in Nigeria used drugs to have a good time, 54 percent wanted to experiment to see what it is like, and 20–40 percent used it to alter their moods, this particular country-wide updated survey by NBS and CRISA excluded figures on teenagers like Happiness mired in the stark wilderness of prostitution and the dangerous highs of crack cocaine, probably believing drugs were little known among that age group. And that is worrying.

Few people in Nigeria would forget in a hurry, the heartrending story of Lizzy, the 26-year-old with a dependence on crack cocaine until her rescue by Dr. Tony Rapu, the founder of Freedom Foundation, an anti-drug dependence non governmental organisation (NGO).

Lizzy said she had been taking crack cocaine and living with her captors for seven years, since she was 19, before she was rescued by Rapu.

She explained that she developed a hankering for cocaine seven years ago while smoking weed with her boyfriend. The latter, she said, eventually revealed to her that he had been mixing her wraps with cocaine to her surprise, but it was too late as she had gotten addicted.

And there are several such stories of (intentional and intentional) teen drug abuse and addiction. And that is why the negligence of the most-concerned government agencies suggested by their failure to capture the quantifiable extent of hard drugs’ impact on teenage and young adult population in Nigeria is so worrying.

It suggests relative negligence from the government towards the deep cuts this menace is boring in the lives of several teenagers across Nigeria.

Taming the dragon

Recently, the Medical Director (MD) of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital (FNPH), Yaba, Dr Oluwayemi Ogun, raised the alarm over the increasing prevalence of drug abused induced mental disorders among children, adolescent and adult Nigerians saying over 150 new cases are admitted at the hospital and its Child and Adolescent Centre, Oshodi Annexe every week.

Reacting to teen addiction to psychotropic substances, she said, in an exclusive interview with The Nation, that: “Codeine, cocaine, Indian Hemp, Tramadol and Rohypnol are seriously dangerous to health the way they are abused.”

“There is a need for a lot of counselling and education of the youths. They must be made to understand that taking psychotropic substances would have adverse effects on them and possibly wreck their lives. Since the lockdown, the number of people taking drugs has sky-rocketed. Many of them ended up as our patients at the psychiatric hospital. Troubled teenagers especially must understand that the good times are made, not sniffed, drunk or smoked.”

Dr Oluwayemi Ogun

The senior psychiatrist urged parents, schools and religious groups to complement government’s efforts at combating the trend. “We must act fast before this thing engulfs us… Many turn to hard drugs to escape their daily problems, to forget their battles with academic failure, unemployment, poverty and so on. But hard drugs do not take away problems, they add to the problems and compound them for users,” she said.

Priscilla Benjamin-Olaoye, a mental health expert, stated that hard drugs only offer a temporary sensation. Once the drug wears off, individuals put themselves at risk of developing a dependence as they try to reach the same high and avoid withdrawals.

Should parents resort to spiritual homes or visit orthodox psychiatric hospitals to help their teenagers?

Benjamin-Olaoye argued that although the first assumption to make is that drug addiction is a spiritual problem, substance abuse is actually a chronic relapsing disorder, leading to mental and behavioural challenges.

Arguably, a spiritual problem, she stressed, is one in which the individual has no control over, but “in this case, substance abuse is one which the individual behaves themselves into.”

You cannot pray yourself out of what you behaved yourself into, she argued, urging parents to implement a healthy balance of both. She said, “Don’t focus on the spiritual aspect, while the emotional needs of the child are left unmet.”

Priscilla-Olaoye could save her homily for parents like Corporal Martins. A random trip to Ipodo unfurled with confounding imagery of the Nigerian police officer. Through the muck and mayhem of the drug den, the fair-complexioned man engaged O’ngbana, among others, in a heated argument.

Martins, a self-confessed cannabis lover cut a curious picture lounging at a makeshift bar cum drug den with his twin sons. Although the latter is barely six-years-old, he argued that he had done nothing wrong by bringing them to the drug den.

Martins dismissed warnings that bringing his five and six-year-old sons to the drug den might wreak dangerous influence on them arguing, “Why should I hide my vices from them while I train them? They will be the ones to train me when I age,” he said to wild applause.

This further stressed the need for parents to take more responsibility as leaders in their children’s lives. They need to continually think like leaders and realize that they are not their own. And if they are truly committed to adding value to their children, they will have to think beyond their own emotions, feelings, and beyond their own perspectives and observations, and act objectively, considering what is best for their children per time.

Amid the chaos of Ipodo, Happiness makes a living as a sex slave and drug dealer, on the watch of a fierce madame, Ralph and O’ngbana.

A radiant captive in a dingy brothel,  the 14-year-old  sheds her innocence in the warrens of Ipodo, sleeping with seven to eight men daily. Sometimes 10. Even so, she would not sleep at night. “Menacing, ill-smelling patrons” bang on her door, intruding her private space, to ravage her paling body, under her madame and O’ngbana’s eagle eyes, till the wee hours of the morning.

It is sad enough that men old enough to be her father drool to her door, day and night, to maul and harvest womanly fruits from her girly frame. And it is even sadder that she could become another of the many sunk in the mess of drug dependence, as it hard drugs are popular enough to be considered work tools for sex workers.

This further poses another odd before her and even threatens to cart away with any will she has to create a fairer tomorrow for herelf. Nobody desrves such a deserves being dealt such a bleak outlook on their future. And at just 14, she more so.

We call on the relevant authorities to swing into action to save Happiness’ future as well as that of the hundreds and probably thousands of other teenage girls (and boys) trapped in the chaotic cycle of poverty, sex trafficking and drug abuse/merchandising in Nigeria, and that of those teenagers who are (becoming) drug dependent. And Ipodo will be a good place to start.

NB: Several Excerpts (including all first-hand accounts of the sex and drug cycle in Ipodo) culled from Olatunji Ololade’s Special Report for The Nation Newspaper.