Agnes Namaganda
6 July 2009
Kampala — Substance abuse is the leading cause of students dropping out of school. Eighty percent of all clients at National Care Centre (NCC) are school drop-outs between 18-23 years of age.
NCC is one of the few private drug rehabilitation centres in the country. Mr John Amanya, the director of behavioural services at this Nsambya-based rehab centre, attributes the high number of young people taking drugs to peer pressure, a phenomenon that is more pronounced amongst teenagers than in any other age group.
Generally, students abusing drugs find it difficult to cope with daily routines of an ordinary school as they will usually feel an urge to feed their habit at some point. This usually compels them to escape out of school or to find somewhere safe to ingest the drug. Failure to lay hands on the addictive substance may translate into irritability and sometimes violent behaviour, leading to expulsion.
17-year-old Brian was a model student, until out of the blue he suddenly became shabby, unruly and uninterested in school. His parents were saddened that a boy who had joined one of the best schools in the country on merit, had degenerated so fast into a delinquent. He was expelled from two schools as his grades deteriorated and he became undisciplined.
Brian was already addicted to drugs, but his parents were not aware of this. It was after he was expelled from a third school that he was checked into NCC. Mr Abel Asiimwe Bimbona, the headmaster of Bethany High School in Naalya says that schools are seeing an increasing number of drug-related cases. He says that these students are usually discreet and outsmart the school administration. "We have sent away those we suspect to be engaged in the habit although we have never really caught any of them red-handed. These students are usually undisciplined, social misfits who find themselves at loggerheads with the school administration," he said.
University student Ahmed Atuhiire, says so many of his former classmates are addicts. "They primarily survived on the drug, taking off time either early in the morning or after school when they went to the bushes to smoke. This enabled them to function normally. And they survived through school this way till the end. They are still addicted to marijuana up to now," he said.
Dr David Basangwa, a senior consultant psychiatrist at Butabika Hospital, the national referral hospital for the mentally sick, says that drug-related admissions mostly afflict teenagers. "50% of these drug-related cases at the hospital are youth in the age bracket of 13-21 years," he says. He observed that children are taking drugs at a much earlier age because by the time the problem graduates to a health threat, someone has been an addict for about 5-10 years.
For school-going children to be fighting for their lives because of drug addiction means that some actually start the habit as early as in primary school. On June 26, which is the UN Day against drug abuse and drug trafficking, NCC Executive Director Martial Magirigi warned schools to stop blocking NGOs from counseling students. "When we go there, they tell us, 'we are busy, we have mid-term exams, we are organising this or that. When they find students who are abusing drugs, they send them away to go and spread the habit in other schools," he said.
He wants school administrators to seek help on behalf of their students in order for drug addicts not to transfer their habit from one school to another. Dr Basangwa says that even though preventing drug abuse among students requires different players - the government, school administrations, the media and peers to campaign against them, care has to begin at home. "As long as a family has children, those children have the potential to be drug abusers," he said.
Corrective measures
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