22pc addict children live in slums: Report
What are you doing? Asha asks her playmate as he takes smell keeping his mouth in a polybag. “Come and see what I am doing,” says the boy and helps her learn the funny game. This is how 10-year-old Asha becomes a drug addict.
Asha, who hails from Barisal sadar, dropped out of primary school a year ago. Her mother runs their family with the money she earns supplying water to shops in the fish market in Barisal city, as her father does not do any work.
She came to know the boy on her way to school. At the beginning, she took smell considering it a mere 'fun'. Afterwards, she got habituated with taking the smell, as she could not pass her days without it.
Later, she was sent to Barisal Medical College Hospital for cure and from there to National Drug Addiction Cure Centre in Dhaka. She has been undergoing treatment for the last one year. But, she cannot take medicine regularly due to want of money.
Like Asha, two children including 10-year-old Khodeza were found taking smell from polythene bag on a footpath at Phathapath in the capital. Khodeza leads her life by selling the abandoned things including papers that she collects from dustbins and footpaths.
When asked why she takes smell by putting shoe making gum inside polybag, Khodeza said, “I do this because I want to forget agony in my life… after taking smell, I feel sleepy. It helps me forget the complex world; it isolates me from the mundane life.”
According to a Unicef survey on “How street children are being drug addicts?” conducted in six divisions and 12 districts of Bangladesh, children are getting addicted to drugs due to environment and family related problems.
Of the addict street children, the report said, 55 percent children live in residential areas, 22 percent in slums, 12 percent in bus, launch and rail stations, three percent on footpaths, and eight percent in other places.
Some 16 percent children become dug addicts by self-efforts, 20 percent get familiar with drugs for instigation from friends, 63 percent get drug addiction following combined efforts or due to waste of money or to remove loneliness, said the report.
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