Earthquake victims and drug dependency

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), together with the Pakistani Ministry of Health (MoH), has launched a series of awareness raising workshops as part of its efforts to prevent drug dependency and addiction among victims of the 8 October earthquake. "UNODC has observed in Pakistan and elsewhere in the world that victims of natural and manmade disasters are at high risk of developing drug dependence and addiction - maybe as a result of prescribed medications to the injured for the relief of extreme pain or otherwise due to discomfort and boredom amongst displaced populations after a disaster," Vincent McClean, Country Representative for UNODC, said in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Monday. More than 80,000 people were killed and 100,000 injured after the powerful quake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale ripped through parts of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. More than 3.5 million were rendered homeless by the quake. "So far, we have not seen many cases of drug abuse but we are quite alert to this problem and would like to create awareness among the victims," said Dr Rizwan Taj, head of psychiatry at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), and facilitator of the workshop. "A particular concern to us is the excessive use of tranquillisers, opiate-based painkillers and cannabis. On the other hand, drug abusers in a traumatised population are many times more difficult to treat than in the general population," Taj maintained. The South Asian nation has an estimated 4 million drug abusers, of whom some 500,000 are chronic heroin and injecting drug users, according to a national assessment conducted in 2000. This was the first of a series of workshops planned by UNODC in coming weeks to highlight the risk of drug dependency and addiction among various groups - earthquake victims, relief workers, medical professionals and even journalists.