By Hassan I. Conteh

Africa 24

There are pockets of drug hives in Freetown and in other parts of the country with young people intoxicated by  a deadly new drug, kush.

The narcotic grain is defined as a hybrid Cannabis indica starin substance, says wikipedia. It is associated with sleepy, drowsy effects on the drug addicts.

The grain is consumed mostly because it’s believed it is “pleasing to taste and palatable, according to wikipedia.

Sierra Leonean youth are dying regularly these days than in the months when kush first surfaced the country.

And as many are losing their lives almost daily, more are taking the drowsy narcotic grain.

Most people wonder whether evil spirits or the Devil are influencing young people to be taking the deadly drug without a stop, surprisingly, even to the point that they are seeing their peers dying with sore feet. Yet, they could not come into their right senses to stopping its consumption.

The common question of shock  that people keep asking themselves is: “Is it spiritual thing or evil something that is making kush smokers not to stop taking it [ kush] even though they know that their colleagues are dying of the drug in front of their very eyes.”

So the other question people keep asking is how to discourage the selling or the consuming of the kush drug in the country.

Some think the way out is to confiscate kilos quantities of kush substances or to close down the many kush sales points, or drug mini-cartels, across the country. But it seems security men (police, OSD-police armed wing, soldiers) are in deep connivance with agents retailers of the kush drug.

The Cannabis ( kush) is consumed by youth in the rural towns and at villages very rampantly, as we are informed by upcountry locals.

Our questions are: why are police in headquarters towns not doing frequent raiding operations in villages and towns suspected to be having kush spots. Can the police and soldiers start chasing out or locking up in jails agents sellers of the deadly kush to our youth? Maybe five year jail term sentence and a fine of thirty million leones levied on o a retailer of kush can discourage the illicit trade from thriving but ‘dangerously’.

It’s up to the government now to implement some “robust”  bye-laws to be enforced by police, and community policing personnel ( civilians vigilantes) in communities in urban places and at villages in the provinces in order to save our youth from dying every day out of smoking kush.

In a day, almost five youth now die from smoking the very sinister Cannabis ( kush).

The number, five dying per day, might be higher than that as two days ago three young kush addicts lost their lives at Freetown’s Guard Street market, which is close to the entrance of cottage hospital in the east of the capital.