Addiction is rising as Iraqis feel the stress

Alice Fordham

• Last Updated: May 15. 2009 11:54PM UAE / May 15. 2009 7:54PM GMT

A patient sits on the floor in a corridor of Baghdad's Ibn Rushid psychiatric hospital. Joao Silva

BAGHDAD // The drugs Iraqis abuse have misleadingly reassuring nicknames. Abu al Hajeen, roughly meaning Daddy Eyebrows, is the tranquilliser Mogadon. Abu al Saleeb — Daddy Cross — is Rivotril, which has similar effects. Named for the markings on the pills, they are becoming part of daily life in Iraq where millions are struggling with addiction.

In a country which endured decades of dictatorship, followed by years of conflict, stress levels are inevitably high. When patients see a doctor for diabetes or hypertension, stress is routinely diagnosed as the underlying cause, and drugs such as Valium are recommended treatments. Since Valium, Mogadon and other anti-anxiety drugs are available over the counter, it is easy for Iraqis to increase their recommended dose and become addicted.

The Ibn Rushid psychiatric hospital runs Iraq’s only addiction centre, and although large quantities of heroin and hard drugs are trafficked through Iraq from Afghanistan and Iran, the patients queuing for the three times a week clinic, or staying in the ward have far more prosaic, cheap and miserable addictions: prescription drugs and alcohol.

While a survey of post-war Iraq found that less than one per cent of people have an addiction problem, Dr Mohammad Laftam, consultant psychiatrist and president of Iraq’s Psychiatric Association, believes the rate is much higher but that the social stigma of addiction has deterred many people from admitting the problem.
Instead of looking at the survey, “it’s better,” he said, “to look at the addiction problem in two ways – hospital outpatients and police records. From these we see that there is a prescription drugs problem rather than heroin and cocaine.”

Among women, the most common addiction is to Valium and similar anti-anxiety drugs; and among men, he said, “there is one drug especially which is very familiar in Iraq, called Artane” also known as Abu as Shaja’eh, or Daddy Bravery.
“Among terrorists, we find that many of them [whom] we examine take Artane before they act. It eliminates guilty feelings and gives them muscular power … it’s very common, it’s very familiar and it is the first thing we suspect.” Used to treat the side effects of anti-psychotic drugs, and for Parkinson’s disease, Artane is the trade name for Trihexyphenidyl, which relaxes the muscles and, when taken in large quantities, produces feelings of euphoria and invincibility.

Typically, the drug is taken by young men whose friends introduce them to it.
Ali Mohsen, 19, a manual worker from Baghdad, was in bed at midday in Ibn Rushid’s inpatient centre of four corridors around a small garden.
“I have been taking pills for three years,” he said.

“The guys, my friends, told me about them.” They cost the equivalent of less than a dollar (Dh3.67) for a strip of about a dozen, and Mr Mohsen said he was taking 20-40 pills a day.
After taking them, “I feel high for half an hour … it feels like comfort, but then later it hurt my body and prevented me from eating.” Sometimes, he said, he got into fights when he had taken pills, and, “at home I quarrelled and shouted and beat my brother up”.

“It is very common, a lot of people in the neighbourhood take the pills,” he said, adding that he knew around 10 people who were taking them.
While it is illegal to buy the drug without a prescription, pharmacists sell them over the counter because pills like Artane are often taken by young militants and criminals. No one protects pharmacists, and they are afraid they will be attacked if they do not sell the pills, Dr Laftam said.

While Iraqis have been taking Artane since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, the patterns of addiction are changing. Under Saddam Hussein’s rule, it used to be difficult to get prescription drugs, and there were fewer cases of addiction. When warring groups of militant Islamists dominated the country in 2005-2006, it was nearly impossible to buy alcohol, but with the militants mostly driven out, alcoholism is again becoming a problem as people struggle to deal with life in post-war Iraq.

“After the war, there were no people who suffered like the Iraqi people,” said Jaafar Mohammad, 52, a handyman and mechanic from Baghdad, who recently checked himself in to Ibn Rushid with alcohol addiction and deteriorated health.
Mr Mohammed started drinking at 19, but after the 2003 invasion and the sectarian bloodshed, he was drinking a bottle and a half of whisky a day.

The problem of addiction, said Dr Laftam, is particularly prevalent among Iraq’s police and security guards. “It is socially acceptable,” he said, to carry packets of pills and take them regularly and he has treated several patients addicted to Artane and other pills who work in the police or as guards.
“The [Saddam] regime was very strict and checked people before they started their jobs, but no one checks … I think it is very serious for people working in the police to take such medications. They have to be punished,” he said, adding that men on a euphoric high, with guns, “could easily kill someone”.

Major Walid Rasid, commander of a counter-terrorism unit in Ramadi, vehemently denied this. He estimated that five per cent of the Iraqi population used pills, but “it is not true [that police take pills], we do not have any officers who use this. This doctor is a liar, he cannot accuse officers this way, we do not need pills to be brave.”
However, an officer from Ramadi’s local police, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that “75 per cent of the local police” take pills known as “01”.

While he could not say exactly what was in the pills, he said they came from Baghdad, cost between 1,000 dinars (Dh3) and 2,000 dinars each, and that they keep officers awake. Typically, they take between half a tab and five tablets a day, he said, and, “there are some who take a lot of pills and then they become reckless. They become idiots.”
The other group struggling with addiction, and the attached social stigma, is women. Although Dr Laftam sees many women addicted to drugs like Valium in his clinic, they beg him not to diagnose them with addiction. “They are afraid of being labelled addicts … and is it very shameful for a woman to be found to be an addict.”


* The National