Rehab clinic scrambles to save youth from Guinea's growing drug epidemic

At Guinea's only private drug rehabilitation clinic, Dr Marie Koumbassa and her 15-person team are so convinced that drug use is a national emergency that they work for no pay.

- Eromo Egbejule

Every week, SAJED-Guinée (Service for Helping Young People in Difficult Situations due to Drugs) receives dozens of distress calls from relatives of addicts who are then taken to the facility in the Conakry neighbourhood of Dabompa.

In richer areas of the city, cocaine is the drug of choice. Elsewhere, the prevalent substances are tramadol, crack and - in a recent trend - kush, a deadly mix of cannabis, fentanyl, tramadol, formaldehyde and reportedly human bones. People who smoke it have been known to collapse, cause themselves bodily harm or even die.

"People come here from the madrasa [Islamic schools] and tell us that scholars told them: 'Take this, you will read well and quickly learn'," Koumbassa said, referring to kush. "It actually destroys them."

The team first encountered kush in Conakry last March. Its use has now spread so much that nightclubs and lounges are mixing it into shisha pots.

Unlike its neighbours Guinea-Bissau - seen as a "narco-state" - and Sierra Leone, which is the regional hub for kush, drug abuse and trafficking are not readily associated with the more culturally conservative Guinea.

But experts say a crisis is under way, fuelled by cross-border trafficking syndicates.