Iraqis turn to pills
2005-12-04 21:41
Baghdad - On Saddun Street in central Baghdad, there is a pharmacist who doesn't like to sell his products.
"Dozens of people come every day to buy tranquilliser pills, but we know now which ones are addicted and we refuse to sell to them," he said, adding that many were criminals and thieves.
The pharmacy is located next to the Battaween neighbourhood, notorious for its drug and alcohol problem.
"One of them threatened me with a gun and stole my car," said a neighbour of the pharmacist.
But Iraq's rising drug problem is not limited to select neighbourhoods, as young people are increasingly seeking solace in prescription drugs to escape a world of violence, unemployment and despair.
"It is a dangerous plague that has to be confronted immediately, before it becomes uncontrollable," said Dr Adnan Fawzi, assistant to the director of the ministry of health's national programme to combat drug addiction.
Heroin and cocaine use, according to Fawzi, is actually fairly rare, due to the high prices of these drugs.
Instead, people are using pills that are "available for nothing in pharmacies", he said.
Dr Ali Rashid of the Ibn Rushd hospital, who specialises in psychiatry and drug addiction, explains that these pills, like illegal drugs, marginalise their users in a conservative society.
For Ali, 18, his pills allow him to forget his problems. "I float along in another world," he said.
"The unbearable conditions of daily life, whether in society or in my family, pushed me to find an escape," he added.
Families and educational institutions have a major portion of the responsibility to prevent this problem, maintains social worker Nagham Wannass.
In the troubled neighbourhood of Battaween, this problem affects "more than 1 000 homeless, most of them children" said an official in the ministry of interior.
Sent abroad for training
In addition to pharmaceuticals, they often abuse alcohol and sniff glue, he added.
The health ministry, whose hospitals are already swamped with victims of the daily violence, is trying to grapple with this problem and has sent large numbers of doctors and specialists abroad to receive training.
In November, the ministry organised a conference entitled "For an Iraq free of drugs" and delegates called on authorities to tighten control of the borders, particular with Iran, to halt the flow of drugs.
Right now, however, the drugs are getting into people's hands through the legal means of pharmacies.
The national anti-drug commission, headed by minister of health Abdel Mutalib Mohammed Ali, has called for new rules regulating the sale of prescription drugs.
The commission, which includes representatives of the education, labour and interior ministries, has also launched an awareness campaign.