BAGHDAD // Drug abuse in the southern port city of Basra is spiralling out of control as efforts to fight addiction and trafficking fail, according to health and security officials.
The situation is "dangerous", said Aqeel al Sabar, the head of the city's mental health department, a lead agency dealing with patients addicted to alcohol and narcotics. "It's a very serious problem and I warn that it will spread to other parts of Iraq unless something is done to stop it here and now," he said in a telephone interview. "At the moment you can easily buy drugs, they are easily available on the street."
Officials in Basra, 550km south of Baghdad and Iraq's only trading hub with access to the sea, said the city had become a major waypoint on the drug route from Afghanistan to the Arabian Gulf, as a result of the security vacuum that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. With Saddam Hussein's secret police gone, smuggling quickly expanded and with it trafficking of opiates and hashish, city officials said. Drug abuse initially remained low, although that has now changed, with a growing drug market in Basra.
The city's transformation from a drug trafficking centre to a centre for drug abuse is reflected in the experience of Salam Juma'a, a student of Basra University. He says he began transporting drugs in 2005 when he was in high school. He made a small fortune acting as a courier for the big businessmen running the trade. He then became a drug user and is now addicted to heroin. "It was a good business at first and in a few years I made enough to buy my family a home and myself a car," Mr Juma'a said.
The teenager would pick up packages brought in from the Iranian border and move them down to the frontier with Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, where he would hand them over to other couriers. His youth was a convenient disguise that let him slip past police and army checkpoints. Mr Juma'a then decided to try the drugs, and has since struggled with an addiction. "I used to transport drugs to earn a living for my family, and that was fair," he said. "But since I started taking drugs, I work to pay for my habit. All the money I earn goes into paying for the drugs I take.
"I'm not looking after my family anymore, I don't think of them. I have a mother, father, and two sisters. What I have become is awful, I need help, I wish I could get help. I want to get my normal life back." Many of his friends in university were also drug abusers, he said, failing in their studies and turning to crime in order to feed their addictions. "People get desperate and they'll do anything to get money for their drugs. They'll steal, they'll kidnap or kill, they'd join a militia, anything is possible," he said.
These rapid developments are something that local and central authorities had failed to keep pace with, Mr al Sabar, the health official, said. "During the 1980s there was a problem with alcohol abuse in Iraq, but we worked very hard and learnt how to address it," he said. "In the end we had some successes, largely through re-education programmes. But no one is working properly on such things with drugs today."
Although there are no published statistics for numbers of drug users, experts involved in the field in Basra said they were dealing with an increasing number of cases, mainly comprising young men and the unemployed. "Many of the students in college are using drugs," said Shatha Abdul Latif, a social sciences professor at Basra University. "We are beginning programmes to educate them about the risks of drugs. This is something new for us."
An unconfirmed report from a source dealing with addiction cases in a Basra medical clinic said 800 students were registered as needing treatment. Although the city has narcotic abuse treatment facilities, including a government anti-drug centre, those close to the schemes doubt their effectiveness, however. "We've never seen anything like this before, it's totally new for us," said Mrs Abdul Latif. "There is a [drug addiction treatment] centre but it is not very active, not many people go there."
The security services are trying to stop smuggling of all kinds, including drugs. Yet officers complain about a lack of resources and legal guidance. "We are not achieving our goals to stop these drug activities," said Ulset al Idani, a member of the drug enforcement commission in Basra. "There needs to be a clear national plan for this, there needs to be a law that gives our special forces [specialist army units] the authority to go after the drug smugglers and sellers."
Mr al Idani also said efforts to tackle drug trafficking and abuse were undermined by what he called "official" involvement. "I think some Iraqi officials here are linked to the drugs trade. They are making a good business for themselves at the community's expense," he said. "We also have good reasons to believe the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are involved. That makes it very hard to go up against this. It will need a firm government decision, not just a local effort."
In addition to its well-equipped military units, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard controls a vast business empire worth billions of dollars and is widely suspected of involvement in smuggling by the US authorities and Iraqis. Although claims of Iranian security forces' complicity cannot be verified and are denied by Tehran, one smuggler who spoke on condition of anonymity insisted it was the case. "The Iranian secret police is fuelling this drugs problem," he said.
nlatif@thenational.ae
