‘Hey, Got Some Hash?’: The Dangers of a Social Smoke
By: Aya Aboshady
@Aya_Abuchadiee
Marwan* knew he had a problem when he realized that the first person on his speed dial list was his drug dealer.
The 26-year-old former addict describes his nine-year drug ordeal which began when he was 15 experimenting with cannabis with his friends as a slow descent into hell.
When he sustained a severe sports injury at 17, he started taking ketamine, generally prescribed for chronic pain.
“That’s when everything started falling apart, one step at a time,” he said.
His promising days as a member of the junior national basketball team well behind him, Marwan said that he had gained weight and fallen into depression.
“After quitting basketball, I gained 20 kilos. Whether it’s hash, weed, wax dabs or oil, all of these substances make you hungry all the time and I couldn’t resist the hunger,” he explained.
His parents were not aware that he was a smoker, let alone a drug addict who was now beginning to abuse cocaine. However, his siblings eventually found out.
“They didn’t know until the very end. And when they did, especially the older one, he wanted to check me into rehab. But I wanted to prove I could quit on my own and that I’m not an addict. And it happened,” he said.
By the time Marwan quit in February 2019, he had been a university student for seven years.
“I only quit exactly two months ago. It’s safe to say that this was not, by any means, a perfect phase in my life,” he explained.
“This semester is officially my first sober year. I really want to graduate. Back in high school, I was on the highest honors list and had gotten excellent Thanaweya Amma scores,” he lamented.
Marwan’s story is a common one for millions of Egyptian youth, although the outcome is sometimes tragically fatal.
According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), drug use rates are highest amongst late teens and those in their twenties.
“The rate of drug addiction in Egypt is twice the global rates,” Minister of Social Solidarity and Chairperson and Director of the Fund for Drug Control and Treatment of Addiction (FDCAT) Ghada Wali told talk show host Lamis Al Hadidy in early 2018.
Wali said the percentage of Egyptians using cannabis reached 23.3 percent in 2017, and that 37.8 percent of the general drug users were aged between 20-29.
“Abusing some drugs is getting normalized nowadays. I see a lot of students using hash, for example, and sometimes mixing it with alcohol and other substances, and they keep exceeding the doses,” said Senior Counselor at the Center for Student Wellbeing at the American University in Cairo (AUC) Amal Badeeb.
This normalization is due to lack of awareness about the long term effects of such substances, she added.
According to statistics from FDCTA, 97 of drug addicts are men. And the FDCTA has stated that 54.8 of those who sought help said they were introduced to drugs through friends. At least 8.7 percent said they got into drugs because they were curious.
Youssef*, another former hash addict, told The Caravan that he started when he was just 13 years old. By the time he turned 16, he became a chronic smoker and substance user.
“I quit 18 months ago,” he said, now 25.
He decided to quit when his father fell ill. He confessed that before this point, it didn’t matter because it was about his own welfare.
“I never actually thought that hash is that crucifying in what it does to the body and the mind, in any way because of how normalized and highly tolerated it is in society,” the 25-year-old said.
“It started to control my everyday life.”
He explained that he began noticing that he had suffered exhaustion, laziness and short term memory loss.
Noha El-Nahas, Professional Counselor and Adjunct Faculty in the Psychology Department at AUC, says that drug abuse has debilitating psychological effects impacting the nervous system, and thereby affecting concentration, attention, memory, ability to feel, and the whole mechanism of the brain.
“The general short effects start with the honeymoon phase where the first psychological effect after taking the drug is being happy and having a constant feeling of euphoria and relaxation,” she said.
“Then, when one stops using the drug, the withdrawal symptoms come with irritability and constant pain,” El-Nahas added.
Omar*, 25, says his habit made him stay at home and lose contact with his friends and the outside world.
“It kept me in my comfort zone, it still does. I’m planning to quit but it’s like I’m waiting for something to push me to that. I don’t meet new people and I always cancel plans so that I stay by myself and smoke,” he said.
Badeeb says that Omar’s experience is commonplace because youth are the most exposed in society to drugs abuse and they don’t know how to deal with their emotions yet.
“Starting at 20, they have more freedom to do what they want, but are still unstable and mostly unaware of the effects drugs have on them,” said Badeeb.
Globally, deaths directly caused by the use of drugs increased by 60 per cent from 2000 to 2015, says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
In 2015 alone, over 160,000 deaths were caused by overdose, a 2018 UNODC report said.
But there is treatment. Although Marwan did not seek professional help or enroll in a program in a rehabilitation centre and instead relied on family support to kick the habit, the FDCTA says 80,000 addicts sought help through its hotline.
By 2018, 116,000 drug addicts had been rehabilitated, the FDCTA says.
In a bid to curb the widespread abuse of drugs, the Egyptian cabinet approved a draft law for mandatory testing of state employees without warning across all sectors in the economy, including health services and schools.
The draft also calls for punishing those found to have substance abuse and deny them promotions and other perks.
There is also an increasing acknowledgement among parliamentarians and lawmakers that stiff sentences alone do not work.
They are currently working on amending current legal penalties for drug use to also include mandatory rehabilitation of three to six months.
