By Ben Oroko
Are you concerned of the continuous cycle of illegal drugs destroying families, friendships and future careers of our brilliant school children? You can break the vicious cycle by stopping it through a positive approach.
Our society is ailing and under siege; suffering from a worrying deterioration of its families, communities and schools due to the drug abuse epidemic.
Coincidentally, the major concern is not about one getting married, driving a fuel guzzler which is a state-of-the-art vehicle and living in a fancy house. The main concern is how to find a way out to keep our families, immediate communities and by extension our schools drug-free.
And the first place to start the war against drugs abuse in our midst is the very foundation of our society-the family. This is where the biggest drug epidemic lies and entrenched.
Our society has all along created a false impression that it is the youth who recklessly abuse drugs either intentionally or out of peer pressure influence.
It is true, the youth do have a problem with illegal drugs, yet this is just a negligible percentage of the difficulty that the adults, particularly their parents are having with drugs.
We have quite a number of programmes designed and dangled around to create public awareness and education among the youth-teaching them on how to “Say No” to illegal drugs and alcohol abuse, something commendable, but on the other hand there are no such programmes educating
adults on the dangers of drug abuse.
That is why the step of getting our families drug-free is to develop programmes targeting parents, because if you cannot stop drug abuse at the family level, which is the root and foundation of the society, it will grow and get entrenched into every aspect of our lives.
Statistics have shown that clearly that illegal drug use affects every single aspect of our society. There is no socio-economic sphere that is immune from illegal drug use.
Such statistics, in fact have gone further to confirm that even drug rehabilitation programmes without the church’s spiritual intervention and nourishment, will hardly make our society, more especially our schools drug-free environments.
We must be cognizant of the fact that majority of the successful drug rehabilitation programmes are spiritually blended. This simply confirms that, this illegal drug use war in many aspects is a spiritual battle.
The next point of focus is the surrounding neighborhoods, where our attention must always be on the drug traffickers and dealers selling drugs to our unsuspecting children, especially school children.
This is a point where everybody who means well for our children’s future life careers must stand up to be counted and waste no effort in ensuring the fight against this illegal drugs epidemic is taken to the door steps of the drug barons and their agents.
Another critical area within our society that has raised a lot of concern for everyone-is our schools. This is where our children interact and learn-instead of getting education, they are unconsciously getting poisoned with illegal drug use by agents of drug barons.
It is against this background the remedy shifts to having a strong foundation of a drug-free family, community and church intervention through spiritual guidance and counseling to stop the merchants of illegal drugs from selling their poison to our innocent school children.
The family, community and church can inculcate holistic and positive moral values in our school children to facilitate them identify and pick their positive role models through education and motivation on how to stay clear of illegal drugs.
We are neither from the planet Mars nor moon to feign ignorance of the ruins caused by illegal drugs to children or our neighbors in the immediate communities. That is why this is not such a time to keep asking, what can I do? Instead it is such a critical moment of soul searching and a time to ask your community, what can we do to make our society and by extension our schools drug-free?
It is such a critical moment that you and your community should come together, collaborate and share notes on how best you can clean up your drug-infested environment.
It is you and your community to get out of your comfort zone and hold accountable the Government which collects your taxes, state actors and non-state actors to help you scale up the war against illegal drug use within your communities and the wider society.
