Down in the allays of community-based narcotic dens in notable spots in the Kumasi Metropolis, a crystal notoriously called rock is making drug peddlers millions and destroying lives faster than the eye could trace.

This crystal, no bigger than a usual rock salt, possesses a psychoactive kick that drives users to heights, leaving anyone who tries a shot, ecstatically and inextricably addicted.

Ali, not his real name, describing the potency of this drug recounts when persons with wealth have gone with crack peddlers to value property including buildings in exchange for a constant supply of this narcotic substance.

“The least you can get one small crystal of rock is fifteen cedis GHc15 and it dissipates in just about five seconds and it’s gone. But the feeling it gives you; is over the skies,” he described.

A user holds a small pipe known in the ghettoes as a bunker and drops this tiny crystal into it. A butt of a used cigarette is crushed and spread over it. He then begins to suck at the tip of the pipe and lights a match to the crystal. It dissipates in less than five seconds but dazes off the user into cloud nine.

For peddlers; the price of the merchandise coupled with its ruthlessly addictive allure, provides them another cash cow for their illegal but very gainful business.

‘Rock’ comes across as a reinforcement for the chains and prison gates keeping its users forever incarcerated in their highly expensive escapades with narcotic drugs.

As word of this substance spreads like wildfire in drug-peddling ghettoes and narcotic hubs; Ghana can only dread the health hazards and the risk it poses to persons rushing to excite their addictive ecstasies with ‘rock’.

Tie

‘Tie’ another addition to the market leaders is another substance made up of inferior cocaine mixed with powdered Indian hemp.

Though Ali couldn’t tell me its price, tie is rolled in a small wrapper, and smoked like a cigarette.

Its psychoactive potency is said to be at the heights of ‘rock’ and its variants on the trade.

Ali tells Ultimate News’ reporter Ivan Heathcote–Fumador that some addicts on these drugs have turned out with very dry skins indicative of the ability of the substances to literally dehydrate the body of its fluids.

Amnesia

A type of Indian hemp that ghetto dwellers have named ‘amnesia’ has gained grounds competing with the traditional Indian hemp popularly called weed.

They claim this type is imported from other countries making peddlers call it ‘foreign weed.’

It is unclear whether it is a brand creation of the peddlers to tease the Ghanaian preference for foreign products or a real drug trafficking issue on Ghana’s hands.

Users would not tell from which country the variant of the hemp is being trafficked through Ghana’s borders.

Fighting The Menace

Fighting this menace might not be easy because of the involvement of security operatives working within the units mandated to lead the fight.

Ali tells me, most of the pedlers were not around and many had gone into hiding on the day we were speaking because they were told by an insider that the police was coming for a swoop.

He pointed to a woman who was nearly arrested because she did not get the announcement on time to pack off early enough before the personnel got to the scene.

Just a few meters ahead, a police vehicle was parked with officers looking through their windshields as if to catch a culprit red-handed.

Unfortunately, law enforcement in the Ashanti Regional capital has tacitly without official admission, accepted that some areas including Allah Bar Tinka, Krofrom Columbia, Bantama Nsuoase just to mention a few are plagued with a chronic drug menace that can never be purged.

To be fair, each region across the country has its own narcotic drug dens well established for years with cartels, cells, kingpins, and drug Lords operating for generations.

Health and Security Threats

As a majority of these drug addicts loosely called ‘jonkies’ crave their lifeblood without which they slip into unimaginable withdrawal symptoms, the public bears the brunt.

The only avenue to make enough money to go for a shot is the proceeds of crime by way of fraud, burglary, bag snatching, petty thievery, and armed robbery.

For the women in the ghettoes, trading sex for cash with its attendant risk of contracting and spreading Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Infections is the order of the day.

Children born by these veritable vectors face a hard life of living with drugs right from childhood with no hope of formal education because their single mothers have nothing to spare after buying hard stuff.

Without any intervention, these children face a fate of very likely becoming drug addicts themselves from an early age, perhaps surviving the precarious streets full of predators or finding a trade in the narcotics value chain.

None of these paths lead towards any good earnings except for high crime, incarceration, or hard death.

As this menace festers, intergenerational chronic poverty aggravates an already precarious situation too humongous for the Ghanaian system to roundly tackle.

TWI NEWS