Smoking ARVs to get high
About seven years ago, a BBC article reported that South African teenagers were smoking ARVs to get high! As they are wasting lifesaving treatment for pleasure, this damages so many lives—the drug abuser, their families and friends and people with HIV who desperately need the lifesaving treatment. These teenagers and their drug dealers are no worse than corrupt people who embezzle funds from hospitals and ministries of health. But that is another story.
Beneficiaries of lifesaving ARVs have been known to abuse their good fortune and do the silliest things, such as adding them to kachasu to increase potency or mixing them with feeds to make chickens grow faster and pigs fatter. Who comes up with these ideas and who is daft enough to copy this?
In South Africa, people are mixing the ARV, Efavirenz, with marijuana to come with a mixture called wunga, also known as whoonga and nyaope. The concoction includes ARVs, milk powder, rat poison, bicarbonate of soda, pool cleaner laced with heroin, which is sometimes smoked with marijuana or tobacco. Nyaope is highly addictive, dangerous and destructive! A single hit costs about $4 and is smoked by cooking the ingredients or a cigarette and inhaling the fumes.
Once is enough to get addicted similar to heroin addiction. A user normally requires several hits to get through the day.
Initially the user feels euphoric or if they are heavy users they feel relaxed, but the effects wear off very quickly and another hit is required. Side effects are stomach ache, muscle cramps, dizziness.
The more articles I read online and the more videos I watched, the more devastated I became. I watched videos of communities, townships with able-bodied young people hooked on this drug destroying their lives, their families. Because it is cheap, it is a favourite among school kids. Children as young as 14 drop out of school and work for drug dealers just to get a hit, young girls work as prostitutes to score nyaope.
The consequences of such a toxic concoction are dangerous—ARVs no longer work to suppress HIV, families are destroyed as users often steal for their habit. It leads to increasing violence and theft among youth. There have been reports of gangs robbing HIV clinics to steal ARVs as well as users robbing ARV patients to get the drugs themselves.
What evil person put this poison out into the world to destroy so many people?
