live a great life without drugs

tik: special report

heard about tik, everybody's doing it. "who wouldn't want to use it? you lose weight and you have great sex" - assistant u.s. attorney paul laymon. you will be high in 3-5 minutes. sounds fun, read on..

crystal meth is considered a weapon of mass destruction

have a good look at this not even once website:

crystal meth: are you up to speed?

“tik” (crystal meth) is the latest buzzword in drug circles and is becoming increasingly popular among school children. the drug, known as the "stay-awake drug that makes you violent", has recently sparked a huge response from health authorities. far more is being done to clamp down on dealers than with any other drug in south africa.

why such a huge response?

according to grant jardine, director of the cape town drug counselling centre (ctdcc), the increased rate of usage of crystal meth is dramatic. “it is something we haven’t seen before. it is the greatest challenge the ctdcc has ever had to face.”

in 2002, less than one percent of the clients at the ctdcc took crystal meth as their primary drug. in 2003, the number increased to five percent. in may 2004, a third of the patients were crystal meth users.

the drug is highly addictive. according to the ctdcc, over six months of use 94 percent of those who smoke meth become addicted.

health professionals are concerned about the devastating effects of this drug on the user – among its many effects, crystal meth induces psychotic symptoms, such as seeing or hearing things that are not there, and violence, making it a far more dangerous drug than most others available in south africa.

“the danger with crystal meth is that it is attractive to non-typical drug users,” says prof charles parry, researcher at the medical research council (mrc).

it is attracting very young, first-time users. the south african community epidemiology network on drug use (sendu), which monitors drug use countrywide, found the greatest increase in users to be those under the age of 20 years. in 1996, 5% of people seeking treatment were under the age of 20. this shot up to 20-25% in 2003. treatment centres such as the crescent clinic’s chemical dependency unit are treating children as young as 13 for crystal meth addiction.

crystal meth has also been marketed as a way of losing weight, making it popular among many women who would not normally have taken drugs.

health professionals are also concerned about the impact of crystal meth on long-term drug users. ted leggett, senior researcher at the institute for security studies, has done extensive research on gangsterism on the cape flats. he points out that crystal meth is becoming extremely popular amongst gang members. hardened criminals taking drugs that induce violent behaviour is a cause for concern.

“methamphetamine is seen as an ideal tonic to prepare gunmen for a hit, removing inhibitions, sharpening senses and fuelling aggression,” says leggett. one could therefore expect an escalation of violence within this already violent sector of the population.

“give me a straw, please?”
if you ask this question in many parts, you may get a lot more than you bargained for. crystal meth is typically sold in straws, one of which could cost you between r40 and r60. the drug can be found in many forms, from a fine powder to larger crystals. it can be snorted, orally ingested, injected or smoked – smoking being the most common method in south africa.

on the street, crystal meth has many names, including “tuk-tuk”, "tik", "crystal", "straws" and "globes". it has also been called “hitler’s drug”, because it was allegedly used by the nazis as a “combat drug” to fuel aggression and help soldiers stay awake and remain focused for long periods.

the powder or crystal is placed in a light bulb from which the metal threading has been removed. a lighter is used to heat the bulb and the user smokes the fumes. some users call the drug “tuk-tuk” because of the clicking sound it makes when smoked.

available in a kitchen near you
the ingredients are easily accessible and many manufacturers need nothing more than their kitchens to concoct large quantities. recipes are plentiful and readily available, and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make it.

overheads are low, making the manufacture of crystal meth a lucrative business. it is not uncommon for people to make a profit of r4 000 a day.

“because crystal meth can be manufactured at home, the problem is not only availability but that many people don’t see it as illegal and don’t regard it as a drug,” says prof parry.

in a step to reduce local 'kitchen' manufacture, ephedrine, the drug from which crystal meth can be produced, was made a schedule 5 drug in may 2003 and is now only available on prescription. but manufacturers soon discovered other ways, such as using pseudoephedrine, found in some over-the-counter remedies.

what does it do?

according to users, the drug gives an immediate, extremely pleasurable rush or “flush”. the rush only lasts a few seconds, but is followed by euphoria (a high) that lasts for several hours. users stay awake for hours, even days, during which they feel extremely active and energetic. they seldom get hungry and go for long periods without any food. both the rush and the high are believed to result from the release of very high levels of the brain chemical dopamine into areas of the brain that regulate feelings of pleasure.

interestingly, recovering addicts describe the effects very differently, says jardine. they often describe the high as a state of extreme restlessness, anxiety and an inability to sleep. they also complain of many unpleasant sensations such as of needles sticking through the skin from the inside or of insects crawling on the skin (called formication).

although the effects of the drug only last a few hours (depending on the quantity and quality), it may take days for the body to fully recover. once the effects have worn off, users hit a low - a feeling of exhaustion and depression. many people use the “white pipe” combination of dagga and mandrax to come down from the high.

long-term effects

crystal meth can be damaging in several ways. the drug is commonly sold as a combination of amphetamines and talcum powder, baking powder, starch, glucose or quinine. these additives can be very poisonous. because the user never knows exactly what he is using, even an experienced user can accidentally overdose.

tolerance develops quickly, which means that higher doses of the drug need to be used to get the same effect, and/or that the drug needs to be taken more frequently or in different ways.

chronic abuse can lead to out-of-control rages, violence, anxiety, confusion, mood disturbances and insomnia. users can become psychotic, experiencing symptoms such as paranoia, hallucinations and flight of ideas (jumping from one topic to the next). the paranoia can result in homicide or suicide.

the drug causes increased heart rate and blood pressure and can lead to irreversible damage to blood vessels in the brain, producing strokes. other effects include respiratory problems and irregular heartbeat.

crystal meth affects many parts of the central nervous system. according to the treatment guidelines issued by the us center for substance abuse treatment, “some of the most frightening findings about meth suggest that its prolonged use not only modifies behaviours, but literally changes the brain in fundamental and longlasting ways”.

there is also an increased risk of being infected with hiv or other sexually transmitted infections, because many people become more sexually active when on a high, often describing hours of wild sex with little concern for safer sex.

look out for these warning signs

for obvious reasons, early intervention will give an addict the best chances of recovering. is someone you know in trouble? these are the signs of crystal meth abuse:

* loss of appetite and weight loss
* aggression
* dilated pupils
* rapid speech
* anxiety
* psychotic symptoms (hallucinations and delusions)
* headaches
* over-confidence
* insomnia
* changes in dress, friends and slang
* drug paraphernalia: light bulbs, glass straws (so-called "lollies" or "popeye")

tip: if you notice that someone is tweaking, be careful how you handle the situation. keep these safety tips in mind

x-ray of teeth after 8-months

1. keep your distance. coming too close can be perceived as threatening.
2. no bright lights! the tweaker is paranoid and bright lights may cause them to react violently.
3. slow your speech, lower your voice.
4. slow your movements. the tweaker is paranoid and may misunderstand your movements.
5. keep your hands visible, or they may feel threatened and become violent.
6. keep the tweaker talking. a tweaker who falls silent can be extremely dangerous. silence often means that his paranoid thoughts have taken over reality, and anyone present can become part of the tweaker's paranoid delusions.

special assignment transcript:

while every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, special assignment or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. this transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.

“shattered dreams”

fenley: - in cape town a tragedy is unfolding. addiction to the drug crystal methamphetamine is spreading on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world.

since we first exposed the drug last year, the number of people seeking help has doubled. tik as it is commonly called is causing families to break up, young girls to be drawn into prostitution to support their habit and in some cases it is leading to suicide.

ups: - grant jardine - in the 20 year history of the ctdcc we have never seen any thing close to what we are seeing now.

ups: - denise geldenhuys -i cant stay with a man like that. he is going to kill us both. and all in that house. before he started doing tik we were a very happy family. just when he started to tik his whole life changed.

ups: - rifqa wort - i could not get out of it i tried to stop many times it did not work.

pre-title: shattered dreams

ups: - voicer - well-known hip-hop artist d’low wrote this poem for his nephew. eddie wagter, had just turned 21 and had a bright future ahead of him. two months ago he hanged himself at their mitchells plain home after suffering severe paranoia brought on by his tik-addiction. this is what led to eddie’s end. it’s the daily routine for an estimated 150-thousand tik users in the greater cape town area. but the number of new teenage-users is escalating at a rate not seen anywhere else in the world. we are in ocean view a township close to the atlantic seaboard. the name is ironic - the ocean is not even visible from a three story flat. people were dumped here after being forcibly removed from nearby simonstown over 40 years ago. fadiel is twenty years old. he hasn’t slept for six days one of the side-effects of tik-addiction.

ups: - gubu; fadiel-smoker – you feel like you have already died. but your brain is still working. you feel like sleeping for months. your kidneys are sore from the cold because of the late nights on the streets. your lungs it affects your lungs. and you can not remember what you did. i could have killed you last night without remembering. i could have raped somebody and not know about it. your mind works overtime you are stressed, short tempered. you are nasty with your parents and the family.

ups: - voicer - the two very young girls smoking with him, cindy and candy, sell sex to support their habit.

ups: - teenage prostitute - we hitch-hike here to fischhoek. we stand here or walk the streets. when we get clients they pay us it is eighty rand for a blow job, and hundred and fifty for a full house. when we have made enough, we go home and smoke a pipe or two. our mothers are unemployed and my father passed away. there is no income. i just try to make a little money. girls as young as thirteen come here to earn money for tik. they do not use the money to buy food and stuff. on a busy night we make over a thousand. then we party all night. it flows with dagga, crack and tik, all together. i will tik till i die i do not have a problem.

ups: - voicer - there are about ten drug outlets in ocean view. often drugs are stashed outside a house making it difficult for police to find during raids.

ups: - snr supt jaco westraad; saps forensic lab – crystal methamphetamine is speed, is just a street name, meth is the chemical name for speed. they call it ice, very white between ninety percent and a hundred percent pure crystals, they will call it ice, they will smoke that it is dangerous extremely addictive, you will find that is very difficult to get of it once you are hooked on it. you can see this has a brownish colour. depending on colour this is about a kilo worth two thousand rand street value.

ups: - voicer - many addicts are aware of the dangers but continue to ignore it.

ups: -teenage prostitute - when a friends gets something now like a pimple and it is like swelling, and whatever now, now he tells me it is the tik that did it. i want to experience things self before i’m gonna stop.

ups: - prof charles parry; mrc - for every patient in treatment we have two hundred users out there in the community and then we get an estimate of about one hundred and forty thousand tik users in the greater cape town area and if each of them spending even fifty rand a week on purchasing tik it comes to over three hundred and fifty million rands per year and clearly that is a lot of money wasted on this drug. what this shows is the picture for people under twenty coming to drug treatment in cape town over the last two years. what it shows is that well under ten percent in 2003 has tik as a primary drug of abuse in the younger population this has risen now particularly over the past year to over forty percent the graph showing a massive increase when now six out of ten young patients coming for drug treatment in cape town in the second half of last year have tik as a secondary or primary drug of abuse just a massive increase over the past twelve months.

ups: - voicer - but for family members of addicts, life has become a nightmare. this woman is living in fear of her addicted husband.

ups: - denise geldenhuys- first my eldest son began to tik and after my eldest son it was my husband early in december from thursday till sunday go on until the morning. from the night till the morning. if he cannot tik he is angry. he just wants to fight with us in the house.but when he is tikking he is quite fine. i am so afraid of him. i was in hospital two weeks because i wanted to do suicide for myself. i was there to live because i could not stand it anymore. last week one of the twins wrote a letter about the tik. her daddy just wants to tik. he doesn’t have time for them he don’t give them love he just want to fight with them. he is not a person that i know before. i’m married to him twenty one years.

ups: - voicer - the medical research council the largest of tik-users in south africa is here in mitchells plain. the home of nabu cassiem serves as a beacon of hope for families in distress.

ups: - nabewija cassiem; fasa – we’ve got support group meetings. i think that is very important when a parent discovers that their child is on drugs.

ups: - voicer – the family against substance abuse or fasa started six months ago by concerned parents and former addicts

ups: - nabewija cassiem; fasa - if we can have in all these different areas support groups then parents would know where to go to, if they are in need of a place like that.

ups: - voicer - two of fasa’s many success stories are aneesah and mogamat both former addicts.

ups: - mogamat moseley; former addict talking - i will never do it again i learned my lesson it is not a nice thing to be in. when i got to my senses, i asked myself what i am doing here in lentegeur i am not normal and stuff like that.

ups: - aneesha isaacs; former addict – school is now for me a battle to go to school because i am afraid i am going to go back to the drugs. say now we are forty five in our class only five will not do it.

ups: - voicer - twenty five year old rifqa wort is an ex-tik addict. she’s now part of the team fighting substance abuse.

ups: - rifqa wort; ex-addict - i started using tik two years ago i was on drugs before but tik i could not get out of it…i tried to stop on many occasions but i didn’t work and i was really sick the doctors gave me some time to live…that is all i can remember the saddest part of all of this is that i got a baby of four years old and i can’t remember when i gave birth to her. and how i was with her before that. now for me it is strange to talk to her and to do stuff with her because it is just hard man.

ups: - voicer - rifqa, nabu and the rest of the group are on their way to mooreesburg a small rural town about 100 kilometres from cape town.

ups: - nabu casiem - we will go out tonight to meet the parents and also the community of this area and also to schools to explain to parents how to deal with the situation and where to go to for help and also that there is people that is supportive and understand what they are going through.

ups: - inspector patrick frans; saps moreesburg - we received information that more and more children especially high school children are using the drug. there in front is the guy that is currently supplying tik to the kids. we have established certain persons who are involved in the trafficking of this drug and we are going to as soon as we got more information we will arrest these guys to try and stop and curb the spread of this drug.

ups: - buyer - you got no tik?

ups: - drug dealer - yes i can organize.

ups: - buyer - how much you got twenty rand straw?

ups: - drug dealer - no, only fifty brother. with this connection of mine he is a nigerian. there’s from fifty to eighty rand from a quarter gram to half a gram.

ups: - voicer - that’s how easy it is to buy crystal meth. dealers are everywhere from rural townships to the heart of the city. last year police thought they had a breakthrough in upmarket plattacloff. they arrested two chinese nationals with enough chemicals to produce more than 70 million rands of tik. but this did not stop the flood of tik reaching the streets of cape town.

ups: - comm mzwandile petros; saps provincial commissioner - inside this house what we found was a drug normally called tik-tik in the western cape about ten kilograms of it. more than that what we realized and established as police this has been used as a factory for this tik-tik. the significance of finding this drug here is that we think this the main supplier of tik-tik in the province and i think it is going to reduce the consumption of this drug in this province.

ups: - voicer - they arrested two chinese nationals with enough chemicals to produce more than 70 million rands of tik. but this did not stop the flood of drugs reaching the streets of cape town. meanwhile the battle against tik has intensified. police conduct regular weekend blitzes… targeting houses linked to drug dealers.

ups: - supt voster - good luck everybody thanks for your commitment safety first.

ups: - voicer - we joined one such operation. this area combat crime unit plans to target 8 known drug outlets in the somerset-strand area.

ups: - commissioner mzwandile petros - the consumption of drugs in the province the hard core drugs has been a problem but the consumption of tik-tik as a drug has actually overtaken any other consumption of drug. we think that the problem is that the price of this drug is very low it’s accessible and also the manufacturing is not as difficult as people might think it is.

ups: - insp de ville; saps – they could have flushed because as you know we had problems getting in. they had camera when we stopped here there was no co-operation to open the door. that gives the dealer time to flush the stuff usually down the toilet as to destroy all evidence.

ups: - commissioner mzwandile petros - its concerning if you look at the number of arrests since the beginning of the year its alarming that’s an indication that the police are doing the work proactively in terms of dealing with the problem but it cant be the problem dealt by the police only…we need partnerships we really need partnership if the community sees this as a crisis we need to be in a position to say how do we resolve the problem.

ups: - supt voster - this is some of the stuff that was found here this is the tik straws. this is known in slang language as a karaoke.

ups: - commissioner mzwandile petros - if the parents of the community and law enforcement could hold hands together as far as dealing with this problem, this problem would be gone.

ups: - voicer - it is just after 3 in the morning the end of a 9 hour shift for these officers. twenty one arrests have been made.

ups: - snr supt johan vorster - the operation went fairly well. five of the houses were positive, we found tik mandrax rocks. two of those houses we fund suspected stolen property, laptops and computer equipment and the second arrest of the day is the one where we got the guy positive on his fingerprints and we are looking for him for 14 outstanding cases.

ups: - voicer - two years ago donovan was a just another fun loving 13-yr-old. then he discovered tik.

ups: - lena rens - i was suspecting him using drugs but i could not put my finger to it. he stay away for 3 or 4 hours and when he comes home i ask him “you don’t look right” but he never admitted to me that he was really on drugs.

ups: - andreas pluddemann; senior scientist: mrc - most of the users are and that is also a huge concern…almost sixty percent of the users are under twenty it seems to be almost a unique situation in terms of the global picture around tik other countries have not seen such a young population getting into this drug at such a high rate

ups: - grant jardine; dir: cape town drug counselling centre - adolescence is a time of change, stress, turmoil, etc lack resulting to lack of confidence etc and the drug is giving them what they are looking for, it gives them a sense of confidence, it gives them a sense of euphoria, etc.

ups: - voicer - donovan’s parents also did not know was that he had a weak heart. last month he nearly died of tb and heart failure. doctors are not sure whether there is a link between his current condition and his earlier drug abuse.

ups: - lena rens - on the tuesday they said to me that they give him about 48 hrs to live because he was so weak he was on the heart machine he had a pipe in his mouth. he was really critical, critical.

ups: - bronwyn myers; snr scientist mrc - treatment facilities in the western cape are stretched to capacity. there are long waiting lists and the need for treatment such as on the cape flats as well as townships are staggering

ups: - grant jardine; director - we struggle to meet the demand for our services on all levels, treatment, training and prevention, particularly in treatment. there were times last year where we had up to six week waiting list, which is far too long.

we expect to see about 700 clients this year, most of those will come from disadvantaged areas and most will be adolescents, they will be high school students.

ups: - nabu cassiem - it is a crisis, i will say it is a crisis because the outcry there is from the community so from govt side i do not think that they are taking this seriously.

ups: - leonard ramatlakane; mec community safety – it is a phenomenon that we need to tackle as a government we resolved that we open all stops we make sure that all government department work together.

ups: - voicer - the cape provincial cabinet put together this task team to tackle the problem head on.

ups: - virginia petersen; director of social services -this team consist of govt dept in social cluster, health, education, social services, sport and culture and people forming part of the interim committee. we found that you need about 80% of your resources in outpatient treatment care for tik for example. you need it as close to the ground, you need to support families and the person currently using the substance. we also need to go out into communities affected communities to literally go into those communities door to door show people the process of accessing govt services that we are making available.

ups: - voicer - nabu and her team arrive back from mooreesburg. in mitchell’s plain, they will carry on the fight.

ups: - bronwyn myers; mrc - the volunteers and the people who may have a life experience rather than qualifications are valuable tools in our treatment system and they can be capacitated and trained and supervised just like professionals need to be to provide excellent services and an excellent resource in our community.

ups: - nabu cassiem; fasa

…our doors are open twenty four seven and our phone lines are also open twenty four seven.

groups like fasa provide a life line. in future cries for help will hopefully be heard in time. unlike young eddie wagter’s, whose plea for help went unnoticed… until it was too late.

[special thanks to sabcnews & health24]

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