The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, (NDLEA)revealed that it has treated and counseled 12, 000 drug users in the last 20 months.
The agency said that the increase in reported cases of depression and suicides, which were symptomatic of mental health determination is the reason why they embarked on the remedial program.
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The Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of NDLEA, Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa (retd) disclosed at a conference on Mental Health organised by Intersect Consortium in Abuja, that “the NDLEA has 26 treatment facilities across the country.
“In the past 20 months, over 12, 000 drug users have benefitted from brief intervention, counselling, treatment and rehabilitation in NDLEA facilities.”
The NDLEA Boss said statistics have shown that drug use disorder sufferers were disproportionately female due to stigmatisation and other social constraints.
Quoting statistics by the World Health Organisation, (WHO), the NDLEA boss said before the advent of COVID-19, an estimated 970 million people around the world were living with mental disorders.
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He explained that the figure translated to one in eight people of the 7.7 billion global population at the time.
“All around us today are aggravating conditions or factors of mental health degeneration, from economic depression to wars, from political oppression to social discrimination and from widespread insecurity to a self-destructive drug addiction lifestyle.
“No wonder that halfway into 2022, the world already has about one billion people living with mental health problems according to the World Health Organisation (WHO),” he said.
Marwa added that what was most disheartening was that one of seven sufferers was a young person.
