Former addict is now counsellor

By Evelyn Kwamboka

At the age of 17 years, George Kanieru had already become a drug peddler in Nairobi 's Eastlands area.

He had also mastered ways of getting off the hook whenever arrested.

So, together with his classmates in a secondary school in Eastlands, George would sneak out to smoke bhang in the house of one of his suppliers at Hamza Estate.

At home, his mother, a staunch Christian, trusted her son and believed he was working hard at school. "She knew I was a very good boy, particularly because I would study until late at night," says George.

His drug problem started when he was in Standard Seven after his peers introduced him to cigarettes.

After completing primary school, his wealthy parents moved from Kiambu to one of the posh estates in Nairobi .

"I joined Form One in a city school. When other newcomers were being bullied, I was spared because I was a smoker," he adds.

His colleagues introduced him to bhang, which would become the cause of much trouble in his life.

A foreigner, who was their neighbour at the estate, also introduced him to other harder drugs, such as mandrax.

One day when he and fellow students went to smoke bhang as usual in the dealer's house, the man would not let them in, citing privacy reasons. "But when I peeped into the house, I saw one of our teachers smoking bhang. We then left quickly, but he had already seen me."

After three days, the teacher called George to the staff room and made him a prefect. He told me to keep what I had seen to myself.

It is the teacher who would later introduce George to another bhang distributor in Kariobangi South.

He would henceforth smoke bhang in the teacher's house.

After a month, George started buying the drug for sale to fellow students. Money started flowing in and so were the girls.

He quickly became a supplier of the drug in the school's neigbourhood.

Despite all this, George did not have any problem passing his Form Four, after which he joined A Level at a nearby school.

"Life was not easy because the environment was totally different. Indiscipline was not tolerated at the new school," he says.

While in Form Six, George was arrested with 16 rolls of bhang. He had been suspended from school for indiscipline but he did not inform his parents about it.

George left home every morning to go to school, but he instead spent the day selling bhang in Eastlands.

However, one day, police, who had been trailing George, arrested him and frogmarched him to his school. He was promptly expelled.

"Back home, I was stressed and started drinking chang'aa in slums," he says.

However, his relatives helped him to get a job. "I lost seven jobs within a span of 10 years because of drugs."

In 1994, he fell in love with a woman with whom they worked in a city company. But the woman drove him further into the abyss of drugs.

She was already hooked to heroin, which they would buy from shady hangouts in Nyamakima and Kirinyaga Road .

Whenever they lacked money to buy heroin, George sell part of his property or steal from friends.

At one time, after exhausting all the money avenues, he impersonated a police officer and extorted money from the public, but he was arrested after a short period.

At the Industrial Area prison, he fell sick for the two weeks he was detained there. "There was plenty of bhang but nobody had heroin. That made me unwell," he says.

His mother secured his release, but, after four days, George was back to his heroin.

One day, he met with a former schoolmate with whom they used to smoke bhang. The man, who had since kicked the habit, told George about the Asumbi Rehabilitation Centre in Nyanza.

The friend also told George's mother about the centre, and she managed to convince his son to join it.

But George stashed several sachets of heroin in his suitcase as he left for Nyanza.

One evening, counsellors confiscated his stock and burnt all of it.

"It is then that I searched my soul and discovered my good side. I was a different person when I graduated from the centre a year later," George recalls.

But the community was not ready to receive him. One Sunday, he got a rude shock when he confessed in church that he was a reformed drug addict.

"People who sat next to me started leaving one-by-one as if I had developed instant plague."

But that did not break his heart. George started visiting schools educating students on the dangers of drug abuse. He has since visited more than 400 schools countrywide.

George is in the process of starting a drug information bureau at Nairobi 's Kasarani area.

He hopes to provide information on hard drugs to families.

According to him, most of the rehabilitation centres in the country do not have qualified personnel, which is why most addicts backslide easily.

He says counsellors rarely monitor reformed addicts to ensure they fit well in society.

"They do not bother doing follow-ups and this has led to many people going back to their old habits."