From around 2015, female dancehall musician Jackie Chandiru, formerly of the Blu-3 trio, went musically silent. Many thought Ms Chandiru, much like her musical peers, was simply battling a dry music spell.
Her disappearance was, however, down to drug addiction. Unlike many artistes and other substance abusers who use illegal narcotics like cocaine and heroin, Chandiru was addicted to a prescription opioid—pethidine. She would administer it by injection.
“Due to the strength of the drug, I always felt twice as energetic and with zero pain whenever I used it. And because of this, I started relying on the drug even for the slightest of body pains,” Ms Chandiru, who was prescribed the synthetic opioid to address a chronic back problem, said. “Eventually, I was held hostage by the drug.’’
The 38-year-old musician helplessly slid into the abyss of drug addiction for over four years. It was not until 2020 that she sought help in Nairobi, Kenya. With the persistent help of her family and ex-husband, Ms Chandiru was flown to Kenya for rehabilitation. This followed a series of failed rehab interventions in Uganda.
In a TV interview, last year, Ms Chandiru revealed that she always threw tantrums whenever her loved ones attempted to take her to rehab. She was so distressed by rehab that at one time she escaped from one of the centres she had been checked into.
‘’However, at one time in my life, I looked at how my health deteriorated and I was not just shocked but saddened,” she said in the TV interview, adding, “I knew I had to take a drastic decision to change my life for the better. When I went to Nairobi for rehabilitation, I chose to fully focus on getting better.’’
Luckily for her, while in rehabilitation, Ms Chandiru had a team that was equally committed to getting her life back on track. After six committed months in rehab, she was given the all clear and dived right back into making music.
While many felt like it was a wrong move to quickly get back into the limelight, not least because of fears of relapsing, Ms Chandiru said she needed to get back to what she enjoys best. This, she opined, would aid her recovery process.
‘’In fact, I decided not to go for any form of skin surgery to try and fix my scars, mainly because I want these scars to always remind me of the life-threatening battle I won,’’ she said.
Netherlands: The Netherlands permits the sale and use of small amounts of cannabis to steer users away from so-called hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin, and has implemented harm-reduction policies. In the 1990s, the country began offering heroin at no cost, and the rate of high-risk or “problem” use was halved from 2002 to some 14,000 cases in 2012, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which estimates that the total has since levelled off. Proponents of decriminalisation point to the Netherlands for evidence that these policies work, although critics claim they have not curbed organised crime.
Canada: Amid its own opioid crisis, Canada has authorised the opening of supervised consumption sites and partnered with China to curb fentanyl flows into the country. British Columbia and Alberta, two of Canada’s most populous provinces, declared a public health emergency and crisis, respectively, boosting funding for addiction treatment and increasing access to the drug naloxone, which can counteract opioid overdoses in emergencies.
Additionally, in 2018, the Health ministry called on drug manufacturers and distributors to halt most marketing and advertising for opioids. Opioid-related deaths in the country declined modestly in 2019, but—like in the United States—the total jumped amid the pandemic in 2020, to more than 6,000.
Australia: Heroin use in Australia declined following an abrupt shortage of the drug in 2000, but an increase in the use of prescription opioids saw opioid-related deaths more than double after 2006. The country launched a nationwide electronic system to monitor opioid prescriptions, but states and territories are individually responsible for implementing it, and the rollout has been slow. In 2018, the government enacted a ban on over-the-counter painkillers containing codeine, but the following year it recorded around 1,100 opioid-related deaths countrywide, on par with prior years.
Portugal: After facing an intense epidemic in the 1990s that led Lisbon to be known as the “heroin capital of Europe,” the country adopted a harm-reduction drug policy that decriminalised the possession of narcotics for personal use and focused on treatment instead of incarceration. By 2018, Portugal had the lowest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe, with the number of heroin users dropping from about 100,000 people in 2001 to one-quarter that.
*Additional information: Council on Foreign Relations
