‘People love kush more than food’: West Africa’s growing drug problem

Before becoming a drug dealer, Stephanie was a nanny and a hairdresser. The slim, small woman, in her late 20s, is jittery and animated as she describes her past life, from selling wigs to minding children, and how little it paid. In her nanny role, she was beholden to the whims of an abusive and cruel boss, she says. Selling wigs, and sometimes braiding hair, was enjoyable but she earned too little to survive: about 200 leones (€9) a month.

Her life turned around when kush came into it. The illegal synthetic drug has become hugely popular over the last few years in Sierra Leone, as well as across neighbouring countries such as Guinea and Liberia. People who smoke it – often young men – can be spotted on the streets. They are usually sitting or lying, their bodies still in the position they were in when they went unconscious, their heads lolling forward, sometimes with a lighter discarded by their feet.

Stephanie – not her real name – is a dealer and a businesswoman, she says proudly. She sells each portion – enough to make a “kush joint” – for five leones (22c). This makes the drug three times cheaper than the previously widespread tramadol painkiller pills, which market for about 15 leones each. A kush joint takes about 30 minutes to smoke, but the effects last much longer.

“It sends them to sleep, they enjoy themselves,” Stephanie says of her customers. “It helps them release their stress.” But she also believes that kush runs down immunity, leading to malaria and other illnesses.

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There are different types of kush, Stephanie explains. “Tramadol kush” makes you “vomit blood and you die” (smoke one or two drags and “it will f**k you up,” chimes in Stephanie’s neighbour). There is “jagaban kush” which “some boys like” when they want an intense feeling, Stephanie says.

Stephanie mostly sells “gentle kush”, which is “a bit mild and makes you sleep”. More than 20 users at a time will gather in her home – her “parlour” – or out the back of the premises to smoke. Her kush usually retails at a 100 per cent markup, earning her enough to pay living costs, including her five-year-old child’s school fees. Her youngest customer is a 14-year-old whose parents are both dead, she says.

Stephanie first encountered kush around 2019, when her cousin’s boyfriend arrived in Sierra Leone with some. “England kush is the best,” she says nostalgically. She tried selling marijuana – or “diamba” – before, but there is barely any interest in that now.

Stephanie is still a kush user: when she smokes the drug, her young sister takes over her dealing as well as minding her child who, she says, sometimes helps sell kush too. Business is booming. “I can’t sleep, people come even at midnight to buy this kush,” she laughs, knocking on the table in front of her. “Knock knock! Even if I’m hiding inside they will find me, accost me.”

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Like much of the region, Sierra Leone’s population of roughly 8.4 million people face rocketing prices, high inflation and huge unemployment. Kush makes them forget their frustrations, Stephanie says. It enables them to disengage, for example from the June presidential and parliamentary elections. “So many people were unable to vote because of this kush, they were sitting there and were under the influence.”

Kush affects relationships too, making young men less interested in women, Stephanie says. “Before they [were giving] the money to the ladies. [Now] they buy kush, because it helps them more than the ladies.”

Kush addicts become desperate when they have no money to buy the drug. Stephanie laughs again as she describes a customer stealing the lightbulb from her house, going away to sell it and then bringing the money back to purchase more kush.

“People love kush more than food,” she says. A user might spend more than 70 leones (€3.10) a day on it – a huge amount in a country where the GDP per capita was €423 in 2022, according to the World Bank.

Though kush is technically illegal, there are many rumours about the involvement of authorities in the trade. Stephanie claims she has a personal connection to a high-up police officer, which enables her to sell it openly. Some senior officials, or “big men”, even smoke kush, she alleges, though they send intermediaries to buy it for them.

Despite how proud Stephanie is of her business, she also emphasises how “bad” drugs are. “Kush is the problem because it stops people going to school,” she says. But really, she adds, the true evils are poverty and unemployment.

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In daily conversation in Sierra Leone today, the scourge of kush is referenced by everyone from activists, businesspeople and aspiring politicians, to those working in hospitals, who speak about how female addicts, for example, put their pregnancies at risk by smoking it.

In a country with few opportunities for the young, kush offers an escape from the relentlessness of poverty and the many humiliating ways people try to get through it.

While the basic component of kush appears to be imported synthetic cannabis, other ingredients are sprayed on or added once it arrives in Sierra Leone. Some types are reportedly mixed with formalin, a substance used in mortuaries. There are many other rumours, which The Irish Times could not verify, including that ground up bones, taken from dead bodies, are sometimes mixed in.

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Suliman Jah, a 48-year-old with three children, says he accidentally took kush once, after mistakenly mixing it with marijuana. “I felt bad, I didn’t know myself. I was sweating. I had a dry throat. You feel upset,” he recalls.

He sees neighbours smoking kush all the time. They become so oblivious to the world around them that they often have their belongings stolen, he says. “You forget anything: money, phone. They don’t take care of themselves, they don’t take a bath. It makes you become drowsy.”

Sometimes, users look close to death, Jah says, acting out his eyes rolling into the back of his head. At that point, the person requires cold water and a malt, and someone to take care of them, he suggests. “When you smoke kush you should have someone who is helping you out.”

Jah has taken it upon himself to advise kush addicts in his neighbourhood – old and young. He tells addicts to switch to marijuana instead of kush, rather than going cold turkey. “They have to do it slowly.”

Both Jah and Stephanie say they know kush users who have died, though they are unsure of how large a role other complicating conditions played.

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Jah says he advises users that, while they may be trying to escape stress, smoking kush won’t change anything substantial in their lives.

Action needs to be taken on a higher level, he suggests. If nothing is done by the newly elected government, “everybody is going to become kush smokers . . . The government should try in [their next] five years to get heads together to stop this drug business.” Efforts should particularly focus on searching planes coming into the country, he says, to stop the drug getting in. A police spokesman did not respond to requests for an interview about the measures they are already taking.

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Kissy, a neighbourhood in eastern Freetown, is home to the Sierra Leone Psychiatric Hospital. It was set up 200 years ago by the British colonial administration, and staff vocally say how horrible conditions were there until very recently: it was only in 2018 that patients stopped being chained, for example.

People are admitted for many different reasons, but acting medical superintendent Dr Jusu Mattia says that more than 60 per cent of those they see today have conditions related to drug use. “In recent times most are using kush,” he says, during an interview in a hospital conference room. Users may combine kush with alcohol or amphetamines. “Tramadol was very big in previous times but we rarely hear about it [now].”

In July, the hospital – which is supported by international nonprofit public health organisation Partners in Health – had about 150 inpatients , as well as outpatients, Mattia says, but “the demand is overwhelming”. Most of those admitted for drug abuse are held against their will after they are brought in by family members or the police.

“If you look at the country . . . from the 1990s to date, we’ve gone through serious problems,” Mattia says. These range from Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war, which ended in 2002, to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak, to the devastating 2017 mudslide and the Covid-19 pandemic. “People have had to go through a lot of psychological stresses and researchers have shown that if people go through stresses they find coping mechanisms,” he says. “One easy way is to use drugs to forget about their problems. Looking at Africa generally, [unemployment] is generally a problem. So that is compounding the things that they are going through.”

Patients are admitted for up to six weeks to detoxify them. Medical staff treat symptoms, including occasionally dispensing anti-psychotic medication, though kush itself is unlikely to lead to long periods of psychosis alone, Mattia says. Many patients do not want to stop using drugs: they “break doors, windows, roofs” trying to escape. About 50 per cent relapse and come back again, in what Mattia describes as a “revolving door” situation. Kush is “available in almost all corners of the country”, he adds.

The capacity of Sierra Leone’s weak healthcare system to respond to the drug problem is limited. There are just three qualified Sierra Leonean psychiatrists and two Nigerians working in the whole of the country, Mattia explains. Seven others – including him – are in training. He says there is no course that allows a specialisation in addiction, though one nurse he knows studied it abroad. “We need help in a diversity of ways,” he says.

While there used to be a drug rehab facility close to Freetown called City of Rest, it was burnt down by protesting patients who were held “under lock and key”, Mattia says – highlighting the issues that can arise even where there are facilities.

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Artist Mabel Ironn Sky Turay devotes her time to calling for help for kush users who are struggling. The 30-year-old runs an organisation called Réunion Freetown, which uses art to campaign on local issues. Last year, they held an exhibition focused on the dangers of kush.

In preparation, Turay spoke to users, asking why they were using the drug and how they felt when they smoked it. “They said they wanted to feel peace and calm . . . they need help but they don’t know how to get help,” she says. “If they had jobs they would stop, if they had something to eat they would stop, kush was the only thing that helped them escape their daily miserable life.”

Buying enough food for a basic meal costs at least 15 leones (65c), with prices continually going up due to the economic crisis, she says. Kush acts as an appetite suppressant. “Even as everything else becomes more expensive, kush, the price is the same.”

Her exhibition ran for a week last April. Local volunteers and people with knowledge of the dangers of addiction spoke to attendees, who included the minister of youth. They also showcased kush samples.

“I’m not seeing a solution to this problem. Kush in Sierra Leone, it’s the easiest way of making money,” says Amos Kamara, a 25-year-old artist from Freetown, whose work was on display there. “You see [them] nodding on the streets, young boys and girls.” One of his paintings shows a smoker using kush near a child; another focuses on the damage being done to the user’s organs.

“I’m still very disappointed because I feel like even now there hasn’t been any significant solution or expression of concern by policymakers,” says Turay. “I think everybody’s giving a blind eye to a potentially disastrous situation . . . If there are any non-governmental or young people, people that are passionate, initiatives, I believe that we can come together and find solutions. Those that can, support financially; those that can implement, implement, and those that can just be there to [be] a form of inspiration to [users, be there].”

Turay says she feels that users, particularly young people, are “the victims”. They have a “lack of jobs, lack of access to basic needs. If there are jobs and mental health support systems available it can help a lot of them”.