Uncomfortably Numb: Inside Gaza's Opioid Addiction Crisis | Rewind

Oct 6, 2019 | The Gaza Strip - at points just 10km wide - is a narrow piece of land along the eastern Mediterranean coast. Its Palestinian population is sealed behind a separation barrier and tightly controlled checkpoints.

Gaza is home to more than 1.5 million Palestinians - half of them under the age of 15. Unemployment is among the highest in the world and every day is a struggle to survive. Thousands of young people regularly risk their lives protesting their occupation by Israel along the border fence.

But there is a lesser-known unintended consequence of the occupation: opioid addiction. In 2010, Al Jazeera's Zeina Awad travelled to Gaza and found that more and more young people were turning to prescription drugs to escape from the harsh realities of their lives.

In the underground tunnels between Egypt and Gaza - where lifelines including food and clothes are smuggled into the blockaded strip - Al Jazeera found that a dangerous drug, Tramadol (or Tramal as it is known in Gaza), was also slipping through. The dangerously addictive painkiller is illegal without a prescription, but a growing number of Gazans were getting hooked on it and going to extreme lengths to get it.

"I buy fake prescriptions," Khaled al-Jarah, a long-term drug user, told Al Jazeera at the time. "If I don't get this prescription there are other ways to get the pills. Dealers bring in boxes of them through the tunnels."

Psychologist Dr Samir al-Zaqout treats addicts at Gaza's Community Mental Health Programme, one of the few places they are able to go for help.

"Most of the addicts are between the ages of 18 and 30 ... Those who are supposed to build our future are the most affected," he told Al Jazeera at the time. "If the number of cases I have seen are 150, there are hundreds of others that I have not seen and who would never seek the help of a doctor. Why? Because we live in a traditional society that fears the stigma attached to mental illness. And addiction is not just considered to be a mental health issue. It's seen as even more serious."

Almost a decade on, Rewind returned to Gaza where Dr al-Zaqout told us that most users are still reluctant to come forward to be treated at the facility. "People don't go to therapy or to a psychologist because they are afraid to do so on two counts: they're scared of the Resistance labelling them as collaborators; and they're also afraid of the associated stigma within society," he said.

With Gaza's political and humanitarian situation deteriorating further in recent years, and with a new upsurge of violence at the border, the painkiller problem has also worsened. Although authorities clamped down on Tramadol, other drugs, including Lyrica and Fioricet, have gained popularity. "Now it is smuggled to Gaza through all ports and, consequently, the Strip has been drowned with drugs," said Dr al-Zaqout.


Please note well that my posting of this documentary is NOT a political statement. I am in no way familiar with the actual problems in Gaza, since I have never been there. Having spent many years in the Arab world in years past, I am very familiar with the Middle East; but it is my belief that many of the problems which Gazans face are problems which are peculiar to Gaza itself, especially because of its unique situation and circumstances.

I should like to remind all my visitors and followers once again that I strive to bring you balance, and in three languages. My posts should in no way be understood to mean that I endorse the sentiments expressed therein. – Mark

Fentanyl: An Epidemic of Addiction Made Worse by the Covid-19 Pandemic | DW News

Nov 17, 2021 • Today we learned that more than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the last year. That is the highest overdose death toll ever recorded in a 12-month period.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 100,300 Americans died of overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021. That's a 28 percent increase on the previous year. Most of the death came from overdoses of the synthetic drug Fentanyl. An epidemic of addiction made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns left drug users socially isolated and unable to get treatment. Drug overdoses now claim more lives than car accidents and gun violence combined.



Neues Rekordhoch: Mehr als 100 000 Drogentote in den USA in zwölf Monaten Pandemie: Die Zahl der an einer Überdosis gestorbenen Personen in den USA hat im Jahr nach Beginn der Pandemie um 30 Prozent zugenommen. Die anhaltende Opioid-Krise wurde durch die Corona-Pandemie noch zusätzlich verstärkt. »

OxyContin Maker Purdue Pharma to Pay $270 Million Legal Settlement That Will Fund Addiction Center

The state of Oklahoma has reached a $270 million agreement with Purdue Pharma—the makers of OxyContin—settling a lawsuit that claimed the company contributed to the deaths of thousands of Oklahoma residents by downplaying the risk of opioid addiction and overstating the drug’s benefits. The state says more Oklahomans have died from opioids over the last decade than have been killed in vehicle accidents. More than $100 million from the settlement will fund a new addiction treatment and research center at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa. “It’s really just the first move in what is a very complicated legal chess game,” says Barry Meier, author of “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.” Meier was the first journalist to shine a national spotlight on the abuse of OxyContin. He asks, “Is this money going to be used wisely in terms of treating addiction?”

Inside Story: Drug War Failed?
A report by the Global Commission on drug policy has concluded that the global war on drugs has failed. The commission, which includes a group of politicians and former world leaders, says the current anti-drug policy has been fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars, and causing thousands of deaths.

How essential is the need for frank dialogue on the issue? Can the calls for legalising or decriminalising drugs help deal with the problem or make it worse?

Inside Story, with presenter Jane Dutton, discusses with Neil McKeganey, professor of Drug Misuse Research, University of Glasgow; Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at Transform; and Guxd De Wit, an addiction therapist.

This episode of Inside Story aired from [sic] Thursday, June 2, 2011.



Related »

Prescription Drugs Deaths Spike in US Town
Fatal overdoses of prescription drugs have overtaken car crashes as the leading cause of death in the small US town of Portsmouth, Ohio

Heroin Addiction on the Rise in Pakistan
Islamabad struggles to cope with the spike in heroine addiction across the country

Johann Hari: We All Fund This Torrent of Saudi Bigotry
The following article was published in The Independent in 2007. However, it is still so pertinent that I feel it should be re-read. It really is a truly excellent article. – Mark

THE INDEPENDENT: Junkies don't talk back to their dealers. We are addicted to the Saudi oil supply

Which glossy brand name has been the biggest winner on the planetary roulette wheel of globalisation? Most of us could reel off a dozen eligible mega-corporations: Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, the Nike swoosh. They are all wrong. The check-in-your-chips champion of globalisation is in fact a puritanical desert-nomad from the sands of Arabia who died in 1792, and the evidence was there in this week's Islamic panic front pages.

In his 18th-century oasis, Mohamed ibn Abd al-Wahhab Wahhab had a dream. He dreamed of an Islam stripped down to a cold list of mechanical rules, strictly enforced, severely upheld. He ordered whippings and beheadings of Muslims to "purify" the faith. He smashed up and burned down the worship places of the softer, more mystical Muslims all around him. And - his smartest move - he cut a deal. He met the chief of the desert bandits who lived in the nearby long stretch of sand called Najd - a man named Mohamed Saud - and offered him his allegiance, in return for enforcing his severe, new brand of Islam. The Saud ruling family and the Wahhabi doctrine have been locked in a stiff waltz ever since.

More than two centuries later, oil was discovered under the territory of these bandits, and billions of dollars began to soak into the Kingdom. True to their ancestor's deal, the House of Saud used this black gold to promote the ideas of Wahhab, no longer merely on their own sands, but across the world.

By paying for thousands of schools, mosques and trained imams, they dispersed the ideas of one reactionary little preacher to every continent. It has been a corporate strategy that leaves Ronald McDonald looking like a puffing, obese slouch. Slowly, steadily, they are succeeding in eroding other, gentler forms of Islam. They are globalising Wahhabism - and your petrol purchases are paying for it.

Which brings us to the swish, swanky classrooms of the King Fahd Academy in west London, in the year 2007. A Muslim teacher called Colin Cook has revealed that children there are taught, via Saudi textbooks, that Jews are "repugnant" and Christians are "pigs". Exercises for five-year olds include the charming exercise, "Mention some repugnant characteristics of Jews". Cook repeatedly heard children in the playground idolising Bin Laden. Challenged on Newsnight about whether she will stop using these racist books, the headteacher, Sumaya Alyusuf, said, "No... I cannot withdraw them. There are good chapters in the books."

Why are we surprised? The King Fahd Academy is not a freak. It is part of a deliberate globalised project, led by the House of Saud, that has been documented a hundred times. Azzedine Gaci, the head of the regional Muslim council, in Lyon, France, explains: "When Saudi Arabia gives you €1m with one hand, with the other they give you a list of what you must say or not say." Here's some of the things you can say, taken from standard-issue Saudi textbooks. For 10-year-olds: "The whole world should convert to Islam and leave its false religions lest their fate will be hell." For 12-year-olds: "There is a Jew behind me - come and kill him!"

And what can't you say? Anything about freedom for women, which is, the textbooks explain, "a continuation of the Crusades". A woman can only be taught to "enable her to be a successful housewife, an exemplary wife and a good mother". No need for maths or technology, shabibi, there's the kitchen. They are banned from any form of physical education, because it would be "obscene" for them to change their clothes outside the home. Besides, "they might become attracted to each other if they saw each other in leotards", in which case they would have to be killed. >>> Johann Hari | Thursday, February 08, 2007

Heroin Addiction Spreads Like Wildfire in Russia
LOS ANGELES TIMES: As the drug has poured into the country from Afghanistan in recent years, Russians' relative ignorance about its dangers has taken a huge toll, especially on the young.

Reporting from Podolsk, Russia - The young man named Anton is a member of Russia's "lost generation."

He's the son of middle-class, college-educated engineers; he studied at a good university and became a truck sales manager in Moscow. He's also a 28-year-old heroin addict.

In the years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan triggered a sharp increase in poppy cultivation, Russia has been flooded with heroin. The drug has crept along a trail stretching from Afghanistan through Tajikistan and other Central Asian nations and over the Russian border, turning this country into the world's top consumer of heroin, the government says.

The drug has spread like fire through a country uniquely unqualified to cope with its dangers: Narcotics were largely absent during Soviet times, and most people are still unaware of the risk of heroin addiction, even as an estimated 83 Russians a day die by overdosing on the drug, government figures show.

"It's a catastrophe for us. We were completely unprepared for this turn of events," says Evgeny Bryun, Moscow's chief drug addiction specialist. "We have our own lost generation."

The transition from a Soviet state largely free from heroin to a booming nation awash in the drug has been painful and dark, marked by widespread public ignorance of the risks and symptoms of addiction, lingering shame and stigma, and muddled government efforts at treatment.

Methadone, which is widely used in the West to wean people off heroin, is illegal in Russia, and rehabilitation programs are unavailable in many parts of the country. In 2007, Human Rights Watch concluded that the treatment at state drug clinics was "so poor as to constitute a violation of the right to health."

Meanwhile, at private clinics, all manner of experimental treatments -- including shock therapy and the removal of parts of the brain -- are in vogue. In Bryun's government-run clinic, addicts take turns sleeping hooked up to machines that send gentle electrical impulses through their brains, or lying encased in a full-body relaxation therapy machine.

Heroin has also emerged as a thorn in U.S.-Russian relations, as officials in Moscow have grown increasingly angry over what they describe as American indifference to the booming heroin trade.

On the margins of the grinding war in Afghanistan, U.S. efforts to eradicate poppy fields -- and to come up with persuasive incentives to wean farmers from the crop -- have remained largely ineffective for years.

In a nod of cooperation to the Obama administration, Russia recently agreed to allow cargo planes carrying U.S. troops and weapons to pass through the country en route to Afghanistan. But at the same time, it's lobbying noisily for tougher crackdowns on the cultivation of opium poppies, which are used in the production of heroin. Early this month, President Dmitry Medvedev called rampant heroin addiction "a threat to the country's national security."

Russia has called on the United Nations to link the foreign troop presence in Afghanistan to an obligation to destroy poppy plantations. >>> Megan K. Stack | Friday, September 25, 2009

LOS ANGELES TIMES PHOTOGALLERY:
Treating heroin addiction in Russia >>>

Watch AP video: Russian students may face drugs tests too >>>

Islamic Heroin Republic!

Somebody, at Last, Speaks Some Sense on the (British) Family!
DAILY MAIL: Family breakdown is a "cancer" behind almost every evil affecting the country, a senior judge will declare today.

Mr Justice Coleridge blames youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction and binge-drinking on the "meltdown" of relations between parents and children.

He warns that the collapse of the family unit is a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming.

The speech to family lawyers contains a fierce attack on the "neglect" of successive governments.

The 58-year-old judge, who is married with three grown-up children, will say family breakdown is an epidemic affecting all levels of society from the Royal Family down.

It is "on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even "a decade ago. It is a never-ending carnival of human misery. A ceaseless river of human distress.

"I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family."

The judge, who is in charge of family courts across South-West England, will say he has a duty to speak out.

He will call on the Government to put the family at the top of its agenda, alongside the economy and the war on terror - and make it "rather more important than taking oaths of allegianc" [sic].

His speech will say: "Families are the cells which make up the body of society. If the cells are unhealthy and undernourished, or at worse cancerous and growing haphazard and out of control, in the end the body succumbs.

"In some of the more heavily populated urban areas, family life is quite frankly in meltdown or completely unrecognisable . . . it is on an epidemic scale. In some areas of the country family life in the old sense no longer exists." Family Life Is in 'Meltdown': Judge Launches Devastating Attack on Our Fractured Society >>> By Steve Doughty

Mark Alexander