“We started smoking at age 11 and four years later, we started shooting subutex and heroin into our veins,” Assad and Asraf* two young boys aged 15, living at Plaine-Verte, a vicinity of Port-Louis, the Mauritian capital. The two boys are following a therapy together with a few hundred youth of their age at the Idrice Goomany rehabilitation centre, in Port-Louis, to get rid of their addiction.
Assad and Asraf are among thousands of kids who have taken to hard drugs these past years. Tens of thousands others, says Ally Lazer, a social worker working at the government-sponsored Idriss Goomany Centre for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Drugs Users in Port-Louis, take cough suppressants that put them in ecstasy easily available and sold to them at five or six times the real price by unscrupulous pharmacists.
“No village or town is spared,” Lazer adds, who holds anti-drug programmes in schools.
Drug trafficking is rampant in the island, according to Lazer, who mention the UN World Drug Report 2010 released in March 2011 that states that Mauritius has the highest prevalence of opiate use (1.9%) in the region. Kenya with 0.7% and Egypt (0.4%) follow next on the list.
Replying to a query from Parliament in March 2011, Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam said the government’s strategy focuses on enforcement, prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of drug addicts.
«Measures taken by the law enforcement agencies have yielded positive results: the number of persons arrested in connection with drug-related offences has increased from 1 504 in 2000 to 1 899 in 2010 and in 2010 about 3 kg of heroin, 55 kg of cannabis and 20,301 tablets of subutex were seized by the police.», he said.
Ramgoolam is aware that young people need the most appropriate drug education so that they have a thorough knowledge of their effects and harms.
«That’s why drug abuse prevention has been introduced within the curricula of both primary and secondary schools», he added.
Drug trafficking that is going on for years in Mauritius is frustrating Lazer and other social workers. They are going from one place to another every week holding public meetings denouncing the politicians and the police who they say are very slack with the drug traffickers.
Ally Lazer has submitted a list of 25 drug traffickers who operate from the French capital, Paris, to the French embassy in Port-Louis. Most of those people named are Mauritians living in France.
