The SHISHA pandemic
NOBODY remembers the three-year-old, or thereabouts, who sucked hungrily on a shisha pipe. Few people commit to memory, footage of the girl-child, that incited awe and contempt as she expertly smoked tobacco, aided by her male guardian. Judging by the video, it wasn’t her first time.
Soon after her video went viral on the internet, Nigeria forgot her chatter and animated laughter. Government and child rights groups ignored the toddler and the cloud of smoke that tarnished her beauty like corroded steel. It hardly matters that she sucked on tobacco and chemicals while kids her age sucked on toffees and candy sticks. Yet imagery of the minor incites foreboding, pallid and stark, like a moment’s apparition meant to be an everlasting tragedy.
Ask Aderoju Abolore. “That video and that child depict all that is wrong with modern society and all that is wrong with Nigeria. Only a criminal would give an under-five girl, shisha to smoke,” said the 51-year-old preschool psychologist.
As Nigeria recovered from the shock of the child smoker, another spectre crept on the internet in common hours. It was the picture of a five-year-old boy smoking shisha while staring at an Apple iPhone device. A Nigerian man, Falex Oluwagbotemi, shared pictures of the minor replying critics that “He’s over five years; he knows what is good for him.” But soon after the post went viral, attracting condemnations, he took to his Facebook page to deny the child claiming his post was all a joke.
The lust for shisha is hardly a joke in modern Nigeria. Shisha is a glass-bottomed water pipe in which fruit-flavoured tobacco is coated with foil and heated with charcoal. The tobacco fume travels through a water cavity and is inhaled deeply and leisurely. Smokers claim it tastes silky and smells sweet, making it a pleasurable, unhurried treat.
The age of indulgence plummets as young adults, underage teens and minors descend into the cesspool of shisha addiction. For instance, Lana, 22, is addicted to shisha because it transports her to “seventh heaven.” Thus every day is party hour to her.
On a stormy evening in April, Lana’s voice cracked through her still balcony in Maiduguri, Borno State. It pirouetted across the terrace, like worn boots rifling through dry stalks on a grassy plain. “Hurry, before he closes,” she said, in a parched, dead beat voice.
The 22-year-old slapped crisp Naira notes into teenage underling, Awaal’s outstretched palm and the latter bolted away, sprinting through the gates and across the city to purchase fruit-flavoured tobacco for Lana’s shisha pot.
Besides Awaal’s desperate need to return early, she must get home in time, to beat Borno’s 10 pm curfew and before her husband returns. Her home is a 15-minute drive from her mentor, Lana’s apartment, on University Road, opposite the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID), Maiduguri, Borno State.
Soon after Awaal’s departure, Lana, a volunteer of a Borno-based United Nations’ multilateral agency, invited the reporter and one of her male colleagues into her room from their perch on the balcony. The invitation was too juicy to ignore.
Inside, the five teenage girls who arrived separately at Lana’s doorstep earlier in the day, had ditched their long, flowing apparels for skimpy clothing. Three of them wore flimsy camisoles and bum shorts. One had stripped to a bathing suit and the last girl was in purple pant and brassiere.
The latter lay supine on their hostess’ bed while her four scantily clad mates hovered around a glass table bearing shisha paraphernalia: charcoal and pot, coal and pipe, marijuana (Indian hemp) and shisha. They sent Awaal to get more flavours to mask the scent of marijuana they intended to smoke with shisha. In the interval, they engaged in loud banter and swayed to music thumping from Lana’s giant woofers.
“The neighbours talk too much. If they smell marijuana, they will start another crazy rumour about me. But they are a bunch of hypocrites. The men make love overtures to me in private and their wives sneak in to smoke with me, soon after their husbands depart for work,” said Lana.
On Awaal’s arrival, she deposited peach, chocolate, mint, strawberry and apple flavours on the table, grinning awkwardly and apologising for her lateness. Swiftly, she prepared the fruit- flavoured tobacco with marijuana and stepped back from the table in an exaggerated display of modesty. Lana, being the hostess and leader of the crew, took the first drag. Then to the displeasure of her guests, she invited Awaal to take a puff. The 15-year-old hurried to the pipe and drew on it with relish. She sucked repeatedly while Lana cheered her on, complimenting her for being a ‘hard girl.’
“Now, you can go home and deal with the man,” Lana said jocularly and handed Awaal some money. Awaal accepted the tip with profuse thanks and hurried home. At her departure, Lana and friends converged on the pipe. They passed it round and each girl took a deep puff. They brought out two bottles of dry gin from the fridge, spiced each bottle heavily with an assortment of cough syrup containing codeine. Then they sucked deeply on the pipe and drank straight from the bottle.
They were high and the ecstasy on their faces told manic stories of addiction and subdued grief; they claimed to drown their sorrows by “tripping” (getting high). When a member of the crew requested for a cup, they ridiculed her for being too soft. “You no hard at all!” Lana chided her. As the effect of the drugs dawned on them, two members of the crew leapt to their feet, gyrating to a raunchy club mix blaring from their hostess’ music box . They sang out loud to the tune, in a rendition laced with strong Kanuri accent. Soon, they began to hump against each other, their eyes glazed over, in blatant simulation of kinky sex.
Few minutes into their act, they were tugging on their bum shorts and tops teasingly, to reveal glimpses of flesh. Their mates egged them on maniacally. None of them cared that they had male company. They simply basked in the thrill that caused their pretty friends to unclothe their hidden graces, to the nudge and weird buzz of shisha and marijuana, codeine and dry gin.
“See as dem dey trip (They are high),” said Lana with a knowing grin.
‘High’ way to the grave
If there was a tragedy in getting high, Lana and friends were unperturbed by its likelihood. Unforeseen tragedies are part of life, Lana would eagerly tell you. The 22-year-old revealed that Layi, a childhood friend died recently, in a car crash. “On that fateful day, she was high on shisha and marijuana. She drank too much too. But she ignored my plea to sober up before driving home. She ran into a ditch on Damboa road. She was rushing to get home before her father. If she had listened to me, she would be alive today. She was too scared of her father, an ordinary man. Now she is dead,” said Lana.
“Yes, Layi’s death was tragic. I am yet to recover from the shock. I miss her. We used to have fun. Layi danced really well. We used to go clubbing at Hotbites (a nightclub) until government shut the club,” said 19-year-old Sandra, a jewellery sales apprentice and native of Askira Uba, Borno State.
Corroborating her, Sonia, 17, stated that the government ruined everything with the curfew. “At first, we sneaked out to have fun. We know most of the vigilantes and officers manning the checkpoints, hence they let us move about without hindrance. But when the government outlawed and shut down Hotbites, life deserted this town.”
The divorcee and mother of two revealed that she wasn’t sure she would quit ‘using.’ She is not sure she would remarry either. “My last suitor backed out because of my smoking habit. Any man who would marry me must accept me for who I am ,” she said.
Awaal’s story
A subsequent encounter with Awaal revealed that she started smoking at age 13. “My late boyfriend taught me to smoke cigarette and Indian hemp. He was a tricycle driver and he died in a suicide bomb blast at the market,” she said.
Awaal was forcibly married to her uncle’s friend in 2015; because she “didn’t love him,” she devised a means of sleeping with him. “I smoked hemp and drank alcohol laced with codeine. If I don’t get alcohol, I take two bottles of codeine. The euphoria I feel from the drug dulls my brain to the act,” she said.
Now 15, Awaal is unperturbed that she lost her first pregnancy. “I wanted to lose that baby. I ate a lot of bad roots to abort it. I smoked and drank heavily too,” she said, adding that she eats a lot of mint leaves and blackseeds to hide the smell of marijuana and codeine.
“I will stop using drugs when I marry the man I love. I will remarry when my husband dies. He will die very soon. He is old and sickly,” she said confidently.
Shisha and hemp, soft drink and codeine…
Underage girls like Awaal comprise the bulk of Nigeria’s teeming shisha addicts. Many of them resort to hard drugs to escape their lives’ harsh realities. “There wouldn’t be much cause for alarm if they smoked shisha alone. But they don’t. Many of them mix it with hard drugs, like marijuana, cocaine, adulterated street crack and so on,” said Hadiza Abdullahi, a Borno-based ‘youth counsellor and anti-drug campaigner.’
Abdullahi, 23, admitted that she was hooked on alcohol and codeine, until she understood the dangers of her addiction and agreed to check into a rehab in Lagos at her family’s intervention.
But while Abdullahi regained sanity and rediscovered purpose in Lagos, several youths of the coastal city, most of them, underage, are lost in a fog of shisha and hemp fumes.
Modupeola Odunlami, 18, sold her mother’s necklace and pendant (valued at N387, 000) at N18, 000, to purchase three cartons of codeine and expensive gin. The drug stash was her passport to eminence and acceptance by peer in her posh, private school.
Luck however, ran out on the teenager in school as she was caught smoking marijuana with shisha and drinking carbonated drinks with codeine syrup. Immediately, the school authorities contacted her mom.
“I was advised to take her to rehab but she threatened to kill herself if I did. I was too scared, I felt her addiction had spiritual roots so I took her to church. But she ended up running away from the church. We found her six days later, at a family friend’s house. She was famished and looked underfed. Luckily, she agreed to go home with us. From there, we bundled her to a rehab centre,” said Kikelomo, the teenager’s mom.
There is no gainsaying that shisha addiction is a trending pop culture among the youth, teenagers in particular. Further findings revealed that many high school kids have devised several methods of “tripping” (getting high).
“We spiced Coca Cola with codeine to get high. The dark colour of the drink hides the presence of codeine. We used to sneak out of the hostel to smoke shisha and hemp too,” revealed Yinka Ogae-Henshaw. The 17-year-old was expelled from her school’s hostel in Benin, after being caught cooking noodles with marijuana.
“I was expelled and my mother sent me to Lagos to live with my father,” she said.
A troubling trend
Recent findings in Kaduna, Kano, Abuja, Sokoto, Benue, Borno, Plateau, Lagos and Ogun states reveal high incidence of addiction among the youth. The relative cheapness and accessibility to the drugs makes it easy for the youth to acquire them.
For instance, a small pack of fruit-flavoured tobacco sells at N300 or more depending on the point of purchase, while the cost of smoking shisha at a bar ranges from N2,000 to N50,000 depending on the location and associative drugs used to spice the stash.
A mixture of shisha and skunk or shisha and cocaine would normally cost higher than ordinary shisha. “But nobody smokes ordinary shisha, not even those small boys and girls (high school teenagers),” revealed Chiedu Okpara, deputy manager of a Lagos nightclub.
The prices of shisha pots range from N10, 000 to N75, 000 depending on the source. “The imported pots are more expensive. This is because they depict class and sophistication of the user,” said Okpara. Okpara claims he does not supply clients with skunk or cocaine.
“I only import and supply shisha paraphernalia to users in Lagos and other parts of the country,” he said.
So rampant is the addiction that users have graduated from visiting nightclubs and shisha cafes to ownership of shisha paraphernalia in their homes. Medical experts however, fret over the dangerous dimensions of the burgeoning addiction.
“Users tend to expose themselves to dangerous diseases. It’s a common trend in most nightclubs and shisha joints to see youth sharing shisha pots and pipes. The smoking equipment are rarely cleaned before being passed from one user to the other. That is very dangerous, users may contract deadly diseases in that manner,” said Tunde Agboluaje, a medical doctor.
Why you are addicted to shisha
“It is sad that many shisha users are ignorant of its dangers. The flavours of shisha simply hide the harmful effects of the main ingredient that makes the user an addict in the long run. Shisha smokers have the misconception that the smoke in shisha is safe because the water absorbs the amount of nicotine present in the smoke, making it completely harmless. It’s a wrong notion,” said Mabel Onu, a clinical lab scientist.
The tobacco used for a shisha pipe, she said, is not the same as cigarette tobacco. “It’s fresh tobacco leaves that haven’t been doctored or cut with any chemicals to make people get addicted to it. This doesn’t make it safer than cigarettes because it’s still smoking tobacco, and it has all the tars and nicotine of a cigarette, with up to 100 times the amount of smoke passing through the lips,” she said.
Medical, scientific findings revealed that the active substance in shisha tobacco is administered by burning the leaves and inhaling the vaporised gas that results. This quickly and effectively delivers substances into the bloodstream by absorption in the lungs. The inhaled substances trigger chemical reactions in nerve endings, this release of dopamine; which is associated with the feeling of pleasure. When tobacco is smoked, most of the nicotine is pyrolyzed or decomposed through high heat.
However, a dose sufficient to cause mild somatic dependency and mild to strong psychological dependency remains. This seems to play an important role in nicotine addiction—probably by facilitating a dopamine release, as a response to nicotine stimuli. Thus a shisha smoker is still smoking tobacco and the nicotine in it causes dependence after using it several times.
Perils of shisha addiction
According to research carried out by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the volume of smoke inhaled in an hour-long shisha session is estimated to be the equivalent of smoking between 100 and 200 cigarettes. The estimated findings go on to show that, on average, a smoker will inhale half a litre of smoke per cigarette, while a shisha smoker can take in anything from just under a sixth of a litre to a litre of smoke per inhale.
“Many smokers argue that shisha is less harmful than cigarettes because the tobacco is flavoured and vapourised. This is a great lie. The carcinogens and nicotine are still there. Hence shisha smokers like cigarette smokers are at risk of developing respiratory problems, heart disease or cancer,” noted Fidelis Akinmolayan, a medical lab scientist.
Study confirms prevalence of drug abuse among youths
A recent study carried out by a team of scientists and researchers from the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, sought to determine the prevalence of drug abuse by Nigerian youths by comparing the pattern of substance use in two cities, Uyo and Kiru, Kano State respectively.
The study was carried out at two Rehabilitation Centres: Uyo and Kiru Rehabilitation Centres. The study revealed that while alcohol is used commonly in Uyo, inhalants such as glue, petrol, formalin and shoe polish are consumed in large quantities in Kiru. Also in the study, about 35% of inmates from Uyo and 43% from Kiru used Indian hemp, 7% and 15% used cocaine, while 5% and 12% used heroin respectively. This according to the researchers, is a very dangerous trend in view of the associated health hazards.
At the backdrop of their findings looms a troubling shisha-marijuana and codeine addiction even as medical experts argue that smoking is harmful to health, be it shisha or cigarette smoke. According to the Chief Medical Director (CMD), Eko Hospital, Olusegun Odukoya, “Smoking is a leading cause of cancer and death from cancer. It causes cancer of the lungs lung, esophagus, larynx, mouth, throat, kidney, bladder, liver, pancreas, stomach, cervix, colon and rectum, as well as acute myeloid leukemia.”
There is need for people to be educated on dangers of smoking especially smokers at motor parks and market places, he said, at the Stop Smoking Programme, held in Ikeja, Lagos recently.
‘Shisha sale and smoking should be regulated’
Rekiya Adamu, a social worker and child psychologist, suggested that government regulates shisha joints. “Let government impose strict regulation of shisha smoking in indoor public places. Operators of nightclubs shouldn’t be allowed to offer shisha on their menu unless they have license to do so. And government should be unsparing in scrutiny of individuals allowed to operate shisha joints. Wherever they are found to spice shisha with marijuana, cocaine or other hard drugs, they should be arrested and prosecuted,” she said.
It would be recalled that wife of Nigeria’s President, Aisha Buhari, raised an alarm early this year when she visited Kano State. She said northern youth, including women, were wasting their lives with drug abuse. She urged political and religious leaders in the region to urgently find solution to the menace.
Tobacco use kills more than seven million people annually and costs over 1.4 trillion dollars in healthcare expenditure and lost productivity, according to Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Chan warned that tobacco’s killer toxins also wreak havoc on the environment and
called on governments to ban tobacco marketing and advertising, promote plain product packaging, raise excise taxes and make indoor public places and workplaces smoke-free.
While such measures may be effective in combating the scourge of cigarette smoking, they fall flat on the face in checking shisha sale and addiction.
Shisha enthusiasts contend that its smoke is harmless even as medical experts argue otherwise.
“It poses greater danger when laced with marijuana, skunk, cocaine and other hard drugs. Gradually, it rids the smoker of control and sanity, leaving them dependent and at the mercy of hard drugs,” said Ngozi Edet, a clinical health psychiatrist.
“Drug addicts are the same all over. It doesn’t matter if they smoke skunk, cocaine or marijuana through shisha. Their addiction is no different than the user who injects heroin or cocaine directly into the vein. They all need help, very urgent intervention,” stated Olu Akintunde, a counsellor and addiction therapist.
Addicts have been known to commit grievous acts of recklessness driven by lust for a quick fix. Just recently, a teenage drug addict sold two of his father’s Sports Utility Vehicles (SUV), valued at N7.5 million, for N350, 000 in Umuahia, Abia State, to buy hard drugs, revealed Akingbade Bamidele , the Commander, NDLEA, Abia State. Bamidele said the teenager was later brought to the agency’s facility for counseling and rehabilitation.
Many teen addicts, while in their addiction’s dependent stage are desperate to do anything and sell any valuable to get hard drugs. “You notice when things begin to miss at home that something is wrong,” said Bamidele.
But no one knows when ‘something is wrong’ with drug addicts like Lana, her late friend, Layi, and her crew of surviving smokers. As they ‘trip’ away in plain sight, a more dangerous culture ensues, challenging the mores of modern society. It is the emergence of child smokers, like the three-year-old or thereabouts, whose lust for shisha awakened Nigeria to forebodings of yet another addiction plague.
Nobody knows the name of the child but her innocent chatter and laughter whets the brain like a hunter’s knife. Through the haze of tobacco fumes, you could see her puff and chant: “Shisha! Shisha!” in the tenor of a child grappling with the yoke of an adult lust. Child, video and shisha incite a muddle of awe and quiet rage.