Shal­iza Has­sanali

Mar­i­jua­na is the pre­ferred drug of sec­ondary school stu­dents.The rev­e­la­tion was made yes­ter­day by Lin­coln Ojeer, re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of­fi­cer at­tached to the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal at a poor­ly at­tend­ed al­co­hol abuse sem­i­nar at the St Au­gus­tine Com­plex on St John Road.The sem­i­nar was or­gan­ised and host­ed by fel­low­ship mem­bers of Al­co­holics Anony­mous.At­tached to the sub­stance abuse treat­ment cen­tre at the hos­pi­tal, Ojeer was re­spond­ing to ques­tions from mem­bers of the pub­lic about sub­stance abuse.

He was asked whether there is an in­crease of young ad­dicts com­ing to the cen­tre for treat­ment and which drug is their pre­ferred choice.Con­trary to pop­u­lar be­lief, Ojeer said mar­i­jua­na, not al­co­hol, was the favoured drug sec­ondary stu­dents go af­ter be­cause "it is easy to con­ceal" in and out of class­rooms.Ojeer said many of the peo­ple com­ing to their open clin­ics on Thurs­days and ad­dic­tion pro­grammes tend to be stu­dents, some as young as 16 and 17-year-olds.

Ojeer gave a break­down of the ef­fects of each drug, stat­ing that while crack co­caine and co­caine af­fect the body al­most in­stan­ta­neous­ly, mar­i­jua­na takes a longer pe­ri­od. "It stays as much as three days," to go through your sys­tem, he added."Every drug has its use, but (it) is what hap­pens when you abuse it."Ad­mit­ting that it costs tax­pay­ers $800 a day to treat a re­cov­er­ing ad­dict, Ojeer said his job was to teach those af­fect­ed by ad­dic­tion how to cope and re­cov­er.