Gbarnga — Leaning against a wall, her eyes red and glazed over, Mercy Benz said she wants to quit getting high, but her peers who are also drug addicts are the problem. "Being around my friends who take drugs is making is making it difficult for me to stop smoking," she said.
Huddled at the end of a narrow road, Mercy and her friend, Deborah Bedell, 26, shared stories of addiction and life on the street.
"I have been taking drugs for the past ten years and it hasn't benefited me. My life has completely become bad and each time I think about myself, I want to commit suicide," she said.
"Because I refused to listen to my mom to leave drugs, my mom called me one morning and told me that we were going to Bong County for a visit only to leave me here with no one."
Deborah, whose mother died since she was a kid, said she had been on drugs since the age of 20. "If I don't take drugs I don't feel normal," she said.
Deborah and Mercy listed heroin as their favourite, with freebased cocaine a close second. When hard drugs were not available, they turn to marijuana, alcohol, amphetamines, or prescription pills - anything, really. "From the time we wake up, 'till the time we go to sleep," one said.
"Though I still struggle with tramadol sometimes, I don't take Kush and alcohol again," said 23-year-old Hellena Sumo, who started abusing drugs when she was 21.
Hellena's voice reverberates with a renewed hope and courage to look to the future. She credits this continuing mental makeover to the mental health care and rehabilitation she got at a private health facility in Monrovia.
Hellena is one of the many fortunate females in Gbarnga that has turned the bend on drug abuse. Many more are still trapped in the web with little hope of getting the sort of help that can release from the grip of drugs.
Substance abuse has long been a problem for Liberia . Throughout the 1990s, a civil war gained international notoriety for the role played by drug-fuelled teenagers, who committed atrocities and launched an anarchic attack on the capital, Monrovia.
The effects of marijuana and alcohol contributed to the violence. When the conflict ended in 2003, many combatants returned home addicted to those substances.
"These traffickers don't work with money ... they pay people with the drugs, and that is how these drugs stay behind," said Joseph Ishmael Massaquoi, a young man in Gbarnga who has launched a campaign aimed at rehabilitating victims of drug abuse.
Massaquoi said the increase of illicit drugs poses a serious challenge to the young generation. "This situation is contributing to the increase in the rate of criminals in our communities and is destroying the future of our country," he said. With these conditions in mind, the Joseph Ishmael Massaquoi Vocational Institute launched a program named and styled "Another CHANCE" which aims to provide rehabilitation for disadvantaged youth in Bong County . This program will target 30 disadvantaged youth every four month."
In 2022, Liberian authorities acting on U.S. security intelligence arrested two foreigners suspected of trying to smuggle $100 million of cocaine seized.
"We want to be clear that Liberia will not be a haven for drug traffickers -- whether as a point of transit or final destination," Justice Minister Frank Musa Dean said. "Those arrested will face the full force of our law."
Authorities said one of the suspects, a citizen of Guinea-Bissau, was arrested in Monrovia. The second suspect, a Lebanese national, was nabbed while attempting to flee the country.
Officials have said that 520 kilograms (1,146 pounds) of cocaine were concealed in a huge consignment of frozen poultry products that had been delivered to a cold storage facility near Monrovia's seaport.
Drug enforcement agency personnel acting on the American tip reportedly stormed the facility moments after the container had arrived.
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Officials say they're now trying to determine whether the drugs were transiting through Liberia. The country has been used by drug smugglers for that purpose due to the country's weak and chronically underfunded security sector, according to experts.
Under Liberia's current laws, drug smuggling is an offense for which suspects can get bail. A proposed bill that would strengthen the punishment for drug traffickers has yet to be approved by the Senate and remains stalled in the legislature.
In recent years, harder drugs - cocaine and, to a lesser extent, heroin - have become increasingly available, authorities and health practitioners say.
They blame West Africa's growing role as a transit route for the global narcotics trade. Cocaine comes from Latin America and heroin from Southeast Asia, officials explained, and through such countries as Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Sierra Leone. The drugs then continue on to Europe and North America.
