addiction in Egypt
Studies have confirmed that the rate of spending on drugs in Egypt exceeds 26 billion pounds, and the percentage of civilians in middle school is about 22%, and the rate of drug use among friends is 82%, in cars 49%, 40% at parties, 25% in bathrooms, and 15% in nightclubs.
According to the 2006 report of the International Narcotics Control Board, the number of heroin civilians in Egypt ranges from 20 to 30 thousand people, and 96% of the addicts are
Youth.. The percentage of civilians between the ages of 20 to 40 years exceeds 76%, and nearly half of the addicts have never been married….
Addiction in Egypt – hashish
For many years, hashish has been the most widely accepted drug among addicts in Egypt, as it used to be smuggled to it from different places, the most important of which is Lebanon (Faraj 1980). An increase in the seized amounts of another drug, heroin
Egypt was swept by a wave of heroin abuse in the eighties, when this drug was widespread among young people in major social clubs and among some university students. It was found that the number of addicts has increased significantly in the eighties compared to the nineties, and this increase is attributed to the emergence of new types of opiates such as heroin, and therefore its rate was 0% in the period from 1972 to 1976, while it represented 5736% in the period from 1982 to 1986 (Abdul Gawad 1999)
Factors that helped spread heroin in the 1980s:
Heroin helped spread at that time for many reasons, including:
Ease of smuggling it through airports and ports, where the powder was smuggled between the folds of bags or in coils that the smugglers swallowed or keep them in sensitive places of their bodies. The addict may see these escaping qualities as a means of safety in eastern societies that value blind obedience and consider initiative and positivity as transgressing the limits, providing money in the hands of some groups that have been affected as a result of economic transformations.
The presence of some external political factors that facilitated its cultivation and smuggling, such as the Iran-Iraq war, the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, and the turbulence of the situation in Pakistan. These disturbances have helped to increase the activity of gangs that cultivate and smuggle this drug in these countries, the ultimate heroin addiction:
Despite the widespread use of heroin in the 1980s, various studies (Abol-Magd 1987 and Fahmy 1989) found that most
Addicts use more than one drug. However, when a heroin addict reaches the end of his addictive journey, he will often stop taking other drugs and be satisfied with heroin, and this has made many researchers consider heroin to be the ultimate addiction.
The difficulty of statistical studies and the lack of integration of preventive and curative efforts, and researchers faced many difficulties while trying to identify the dimensions of a problem
Drugs in Egypt, where it is difficult to collect accurate information on such issues, which bear a social and religious stigma, especially in a society with distinctive moral and religious characteristics, and it was ambiguous to see the addiction problem, as addiction in Egypt has a great impact on efforts to combat it, as it was limited to isolated efforts, some governmental and some private. Lacks integration and regulation The use of heroin declined in the nineties, and this can be attributed to several factors, including the efforts of the public administration
To combat drugs, severe penalties against smugglers and distributors (Abdel-Gawad 1999), intense media campaigns (Abu Zekry 1998), the high price of Elroey 1997), the poor economic situation, and the bad reputation of heroin due to the rapid health and moral deterioration of the addicted addict in Egypt – Banjo:
Unfortunately, heroin was replaced by banjo in the nineties, where banjo is grown in the valleys of Sinai and escaped from Sudan, and this has led to a change in the pattern of drug abuse in Egypt. Recently, the Director of the General Administration for Drug Control announced that banjo is widely cultivated in desert places in the middle of distant mountains that are difficult to reach. By the usual means of transportation, but it can only be reached by helicopter. It was also announced that 75% of drug cases in the courts are related to banjo alone, which amounts to 26,000 cases in which 29,000 people were seized. The amount of banjo seized by the police in Egypt in 1996 was estimated by 7 tons, and this quantity increased to 31 tons in the first six months of 1999 despite the tremendous efforts to control the spread of this drug (Abdel-Gawad 1999). It has become a hobby for many young people and it is easy to obtain
Young people imagine that it is not addictive, and that it is not dangerous at all, and they believe that its rolls are less harmful than hashish and it is easy to eat, as its dry leaves are wrapped in paper on a semi-conical shape called the rocket, and young people smoke it as they smoke cigarettes (Abu Zekry 1998).
What is a banjo?
The banjo has different names such as “marijuana”, “al-Takrawi”, “keif” and “gansphori”, which is the flowering tops that are picked from the top of the “indian hemp” tree and then dried in the shade and ground into a loose powder consisting of flowers, small leaves, thin branches, seeds and the drug substance in marijuana or “marijuana”. Banjo” equals about 2% of the total weight (Al-Zahhar 1998). As for hashish, it is a brown substance that is secreted through the stems and branches of the “Indian hemp” plant. Or a structure called hashish, and the live matter in this method is equivalent to 10% of the weight of the hashish, which is more than five times of the living matter for the same weight of the equivalent weight of banjo (Al-Zahar 1998)
marijuana
And the active substance “whether in cannabis or banjo) is considered a drug with unique characteristics, as it is difficult to classify it accurately from a pharmacological point of view due to the diversity of its effects. The effectiveness of the drug varies depending on the plant from which it was taken. Genetic factors play an important role here. Strong cannabis in general is grown from seeds, which itself contain high concentrations of tetrahydride and kana pineol. Marijuana and hashish
Addiction in Egypt – pharmaceutical drugs:
It seems that the banjo alone – despite its widespread and cheap price – was not enough to fill the void left by heroin. Therefore, the abuse of many pharmaceutical drugs spread in the nineties, and this exacerbated the problem of addiction with or without prescription drugs from pharmacies.
The World Health Organization (Eastern Mediterranean Department) adopted a field study in 1996 that was applied in Alexandria to assess the pattern of drug dispensing from
Pharmacies either with a prescription or a recommendation from the pharmacist or by specifying a specific drug by the customer himself. Through the study, the drug dispensing process was examined in 25
A pharmacy in different places in the city of Alexandria, where each pharmacy was visited twice, and each time the duration of the visit was two hours. Therefore, to collect information on the dispensed drugs, the results indicated that 1174 medicinal products were dispensed during the study, and that only 28% of these drugs were by prescription. While 72% were dispensed without a prescription (17%) of them were on the advice of the pharmacist.
This research included all kinds of medicines and found that 45 medicines were a compound that includes 5 or more components, including anti-allergics, xanthines, ephedra, analgesics, expectorants, steroids and bronchodilators.
There were 10 preparations containing phenobarbitone. It is noted that the abuse of these drugs is common among addicts, as they take cough compounds that contain codeine among their other components. It is also common to misuse drugs that affect the central nervous system such as sedatives, hypnotics, benzodiazepines, antidepressants and reassuring drugs (Abdul Al-Jawad 1999) was particularly common in the use of injections of Nubin, which is one of the synthetic preparations that affect the opiate receptors.
It used to be smuggled from Libya through the Eastern Desert in quantities that flooded the Egyptian market. The most used drugs were codeine, troncolase, tosiphane, tosylar, paracodeine (Para), somadrillo alcomital, rohypnol (Saliba), rivotril (revo – saliba), aptril, amotril, barquinol, ethanol, ribanol, valium, etc.
Perhaps the addicts’ acceptance of pharmaceutical-grade drugs is due to two reasons:
The first of them: that the addict believes (or justifies himself) that these are medical drugs authorized by the health authorities, and they are prepared by doctors for many patients, so they are not drugs in the traditional sense.
Second: He buys it from the pharmacist and not from the drug dealer, and this makes him less vulnerable (in his view) to the legal problems arising from dealing with traditional drug dealers,
In spite of the attempts to control the illegal trade of pharmaceutical drugs by some pharmacists, these attempts did not succeed in controlling the dispensing of medicines, in addition to the pharmacists’ rejection of the controls that the Syndicate tried to place on the import and distribution of medicines. Thus, drugs that affect the nervous system continued to be pumped into the Egyptian society, and some pharmacists turned into drug dealers, and some pharmacies turned into something like dens, and weak oversight and weak penalties contributed to this. Different ages and social levels in the world of addiction, and there are still no accurate statistics showing the extent of the drug problem in Egypt