By Nasratu Kargbo
Foundation for Rural and Urban Transformation (FoRUT) in tandem with Social Linkages for Youth Development and Child Link (SLYDCL) has formed a coalition with other Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to fight drug abuse in the country.
In an interview with the Executive Director of FoRUT Sierra Leone Boi-Jenneh Jalloh after a meeting held by the coalition to brainstorm the way forward, she said they decided to put together different CSOs to provide a platform to learn and share ideas in tackling the menace.
She said that they also want to use the platform to advocate and create standardized messages for awareness-raising and community engagement, having noticed that most of the messages around have not been tailored to changing behavior and helping drug users resist using the substance.
Jalloh said their coming together will help them identify areas of research that they can focus on for them to do an effective job.
She stated that the meeting was to brainstorm and form a small leadership team that would be responsible for collating all the contributions made and coming up with a comprehensive report on the way forward.
“Next week we will articulate all our objectives based on what we heard our members say on where we want to go, what we want to do, and develop our milestone, our immediate, medium, and long-term goals, and then we start work,” she said.
Among the suggestions made during the meeting was the need to address stigmatization and discrimination, having realised that drug users being rehabilitated and integrated into their respective communities, are discriminated against.
They also spoke about the need to provide capacity-building for those who have gone through rehabilitation, as they must have a job or be self-employed for them not to relapse into addiction.
It was also suggested they encourage prosecution of persons selling drugs, most of whom they say members of the community know and that by so doing will be a drastic reduction in drug peddling.
One thing that stood out in the discussion was that drug users should not be maltreated, as their addiction should be considered an illness that they cannot control.
Copyright © 2024 Politico (19/04/24)
