Correspondents' Correspondence
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. Africa's Drug Problem Geneva—A medico-legal quagmire...
...Their influx is continuing because of a lack of trained personnel and control mechanisms...
...The situation is being exploited by the traffickers who also take advantage of the inadequate vigilance of some of the manufacturing countries...
...Illicit business in addictive Western manufactured substances are flourishing in the expanding slums of the developing nations...
...African countries wish to pay urgent attention to strengthening their drug control machinery...
...The three-year project is being supervised by the University of Benin Teaching Hospital...
...The educational undertaking is expected to be accompanied by other measures to stem the trade...
...and hallucinogens like LSD and mescaline, plus more exotic drugs...
...Africa's Drug Problem Geneva—A medico-legal quagmire of staggering dimensions, so-called "substance" abuse cuts across international borders...
...Several hundred kilograms of a preparation of amphetamine compounded with aspirin, for instance, and over a million tablets of methaqualone in the form of Mandrax were seized in Africa last year...
...Among these are international assistance to the law enforcement agencies of developing regions, and improved cooperation between the customs authorities of the exporting and importing nations...
...Though drug abuse has hardly been effectively countered in the West, health authorities have accumulated much clinical experience with it...
...the UNINCB reports, "including the training and equipping of their drug enforcement units...
...As customs and folkways adapted to rural existence break down, many of the newly arrived in the cities of the Third World are easy prey for the purveyors of psychoactive drugs made in the West...
...It will provide instruction on the medical, psychological and social problems associated with the misuse of psychoac-tivesubstances...
...Participants will include general practitioners, psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as pharmacists, social workers, nurses, and occupational therapists...
...Meanwhile, however, other kinds of chemicals have been heading in the opposite direction...
...It is being supported by the School of Addiction Studies of the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto, the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control, and the Canadian International Development Agency...
...The United Nations International Narcotic Control Board (UNINCB) says, "In most African countries, there is little or no medical need for such substances...
...Law enforcement agencies around the world seek to combat this traffic and the crime it engenders, medical organizations are busy dealing with the bodily effects, and ordinary citizens try to cope with the fraying of the social fabric fostered by the nonmedical use of drugs...
...Most of the victims are first and second generation urban dwellers who are frustrated by unemployment as well as the squalor and anonymity of metropolitan life...
...And now, as a means of taking advantage of this body of specialized knowledge, the University of Benin in Nigeria is creating a basic course on addiction, perhaps the first of its kind in the developing world...
...The hope is that the Benin project will result in similar programs in other African universities.—Thomas Land...
...amphetamines and other stimulants...
...These substances include such depressants as phenobarbitone (a barbiturate) and methaqualone (a hypnotic depressant often known as Quaaludes in the United States...
...The hungry belt of the globe is experiencing the initial throes of industrialization, with all the social tension and dislocation that this change entails...
...Millions of tons of these chemicals are produced every year, an unknown percentage of them winds up in the Third World...
...Attention in the industrialized world tends to focus on the westward flow of narcotics from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Laos: The violence to person and property that comes in the wake of heroin use, for example, has long been recognized as a plague in American cities...
Vol. 66 • March 1983 • No. 6
