NCCE Workshop on Drug Abuse

By Alberta Larkai

some participants looking at photos on drug abuse being displayed

A workshop on drug abuse and it implications on society and productivity was yesterday held in Accra.

The three-day workshop under the auspices of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) with support from the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, is on the theme; “Own Your Future Workshop on Counter Drugs,”

It was also empower about 50 participants to appreciate their lives and that of others to build a strong healthy nation.

The German Ambassador to Ghana, Thomas Wimmer, said the partnership was due to his visits to various prisons around the world where some drug traffickers were and the situation they were in.

He said the use and trafficking of drugs is a way of ruining ones life and the nation as a whole.

Mr. Logosu Amegashie, the Head of Addictive Disease Unit of the Narcotics Control Board and the Resource Personnel at the workshop, said drug use or addiction was not a moral issue but a sickness therefore addicts should not be condemned but treated as sick people.

He said people who have survived drug addiction were the best tutors for their peers and should make it part of their duty to educate them on the dangers associated with the act.

“Research has indicated that the impact of alcohol on the human body is worse than cocaine and heroin put together people do not see it as a drug because there are not laws governing the use of alcohol in the country,” he noted.

Mr. Amegashie stressed that the best way to cleaned of an addiction was if the person involved accepts that he was sick.

He said the wide and porous nature of the nation’s borders and adequate detection equipment were partly to blame for the drug situation in the country.

He advised students in the Senior High School not to accept food like “Shito” from their mates in school as some put Marijuana in it to get others to become addicts.

“do not take prescriptions from friends, when you are sick see a physician to prescribe drugs for you because the drug a friend might give you could be a hard drug which can be harmful to your health,” Mr. Amegashie emphasized.