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The Journey Begins

© UNICEF/2006/Jason Taylor

Young men meet at Journey, the post rehabilitation centre in Male. The organization was set up in November 2005 by a group of recovering addicts, frustrated at seeing too many of their peers relapse and the total lack of post addiction support.

by Bronwyn Curran

MALE’, The Maldives, Nov 5 – Hasan was handcuffed to a coconut palm on the Maldives’ main prison island when a monsoonal gale sprang up in the night, and his two-year renouncement of heroin dissolved.

“I thought to myself: ‘I shouldn’t be hugging this tree, in the dark and rain and wind.’ I thought I’m never going to get out of jail. With all the depression, punishment, and fighting, I got fed up. All the other prisoners were having fun getting high. So the next day I started using again.”
 
Hasan got out eventually, through a mass presidential pardon for prisoners following a violent prison riot in 2003. Free and nursing a new heroin habit, he went straight to the Drug Rehabilitation Centre on another island.

It was after rehab that Hasan and several friends who’d also been through rehab decided to set up the Maldives’ first community-based after-care and relapse prevention NGO for recovering addicts. They named it ‘Journey’ and moved into a leafy courtyard in the grounds of the National Narcotics Control Bureau on the capital Male’ in November 2005.

UNICEF came on board in early 2006 to give technical support and training to the islands’ only peer-based drug prevention and recovery organisation, after highlighting heroin addiction as the biggest crisis gripping the Maldives’ 300,000 people and threatening its children.

“Even when a child’s parents or siblings are addicts, the child may be affected by breakdown of family ties, family income loss and possibly abuse. Such factors have the potential to push children into the cycle of drug abuse,” says Laura Fragiacomo, UNICEF’s head of Child Protection and Adolescent Livelihoods in the Maldives.

Official estimates put the number of heroin addicts at 3,000 – an alarming one percent of the population – with 12 years old the average age of first use.

Heroin use pre-dated the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed 86 people in the Maldives, displaced 29,000 and crippled its lifeline tourism and fishing industries, causing economic losses worth 62 percent of GDP.

But population shifts caused by the tsunami – which devastated some of the Maldives’ 200 inhabited islands while leaving others untouched - exacerbated the overcrowding and poor employment prospects believed to contribute to the high rate of heroin use.

“So many lives were affected, people lost their homes and shifted from one island to another leading to inter-mingling, and because of that so many young people got into drugs,” says Adam, a former island resort manager who quit his 18 year heroin habit nine months ago and now works at Journey.

“So many people ended up living in bad conditions, with three or four families sharing a home. Drug use escalated.”

“The tsunami made heroin use on the islands explode,” says Ubaid, a recovering addict who attends regular drug awareness discussions at Journey.

“There was a measurable increase in heroin use behaviour after the tsunami,” says Ken Maskall, UNICEF Representative for the Maldives. “What has definitely increased is that more people are turning to injecting drug use.”
 
Between June and October the Maldives recorded seven fatal overdoses from heroin, its highest drug death rate to date. The casualties included a 16 year old girl who had just finished de-toxing. She had started using at 9 years old, a few years after watching her mother self-immolate.

The recent rise in needle use, combined with overcrowding in Male’ where 128,000 people share a cramped island less than two square kilometres in size, has alarming implications for HIV-AIDS spread.

“HIV is going to hit this country like a truck, because the drug problem is so out of control,” says Fragiacomo. 

Hasan and fellow recovering addicts who were in jail say the prisons are saturated with heroin – more than 90 percent of inmates use, according to their personal estimates. Only a few needles are available in jail, so injecting drug users end up sharing.
 
“Injecting drug use has boomed in the last few years,” says Adam. “In prison you find five to six guys using the same syringe.”

“Now 99 percent of addicts use needles, it’s spreading so fast,” estimates Andhu, who was imprisoned for using heroin. “Even in jail they are using needles, and they’re sharing them because they’re scarce.”
 
Free from prison and out of rehab, Hasan and fellow recovering addicts face obstacles getting a job and getting married. The stigma of heroin use keeps many recovering addicts out of work and hampers marriage prospects in the small Maldives community.

“Male’ is such a small place. Just walking around the streets, everyone says: ‘There goes Hassan, he’s an addict.’ We get stigmatized very easily,” he says.

“Even at marriage registration the police report comes, the judge reads it out and discourages the would-be bride,” says Ubaid.

Andhu has failed five job interviews in the past few months. “The problem for us recovering addicts is discrimination,” he says. “We can’t get jobs so we’re unemployed, and for some in that situation the only thing left is to sell drugs.” 

© UNICEF/2006/Jason Taylor

Adeel, 25, was an addict for 12 years. He is one of the founder members of Journey and now works as a consultant for UNICEF and Journey. Having led a life of an addict and with his contacts in Male, he is able to evaluate and advise both organizations