Maldives battling heroin epidemic: Sydney Morning Herald

Beyond the idyllic white-sand beaches and cerulean seas of the Maldives is a country facing a spiralling drug epidemic, writes Ben Doherty for the Sydney Morning Herald.

For several years, the country has been flooded with cheap, low-grade heroin – ”brown sugar” as it is known on the streets of Male – smuggled into the country in boats from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
The exact number of drug users in the far-flung Indian Ocean archipelago is hard to know. In a conservative Muslim society where drinking alcohol is illegal, discussion of a drug habit is taboo.

Some reports suggest there are 30,000 regular drug users in the country. Two years ago, the United Nations Development Program estimated 40 per cent of Maldivian youth were using hard drugs.

”This is a small community here. Every family here has been affected by the drugs problem in some way. All of us suffer,” Fatimanth Afiya, the chairperson of the Society for Women Against Drugs, says.
”Heroin is the big problem. It is cheap, and it is easy to get.”

The ready availability of drugs is compounded by social factors in the Maldives. Despite having the highest gross domestic product per capita in South Asia (thanks largely to its tourism industry), the Maldives has a burgeoning young population it cannot employ.

Forty-four per cent of the country’s population is aged under 14 and 62 per cent under 25. Across the archipelago, a quarter of all young men and half of all women have no work.

The economic pull of the capital means families often live in cramped accommodation in Male and children spend most of their time out on the street.

Gangs are common. Prison is the other great incubator. Research by Women Against Drugs and other non-government organisations suggests 80 per cent of prisoners are incarcerated for drugs offences and punitive drug laws mean people are sentenced to extraordinary terms. Young offenders are regularly ordered to serve decades of jail time.

Possession of anything more than one gram of heroin is considered trafficking and attracts a 25-year sentence.

Amaty (not his real name), a young Maldivian drug user who grew up on another island but came to Male with his family, told the Herald he had quit before, a ”lot of times”, but never for very long.

”It’s just all around, drugs are everywhere here. You want to stop, but your friends take drugs. And the people are here who will sell [them] to you. Male is small, man, where you can go? You know everybody, and everybody can find you.”

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