Inside Dar es Salaam city’s heroin veins

Edward Kitwala Nginilla holds four tiny plastic bags in his hand. They each contain a substance that looks like two grains of rice, neatly sealed in plastic. But this is not rice. This is heroin. Two grains are worth 1,000 Tanzanian shillings.

“I know some people, if they have 1,000 shillings they ask themselves ‘should I eat or should I smoke?’ Then they decide to smoke, in order to kill stress and pain and they feel like they are in Europe,” says Edward who is the Secretary General of the Tanzania Network of People who Use Drugs (TaNPUD).

This substitute for a meal is known as ‘kokteili’ – a blend of heroin, marijuana and tobacco. Edward calls a single dose of heroin “a head” and he smokes five to ten of them every day. “That is what I need to kill the pain,” he says. This morning he shares two ‘kokteili’ with his roommate. They sit together in their room with two mattresses, one mosquito net and shelves with books and photos. On the back wall is a map of Dar es Salaam. Edward points out our position. We are in Tandika in the Temeke District of Dar es Salaam.

In Temeke TaNPUD organises ten community groups for drug users with a total of around 200 members. Edward is the Vice Chairperson of one of these groups, Temeke Activist Forum for People who Use Drugs (TAFPUD). At the national level, the umbrella advocacy group TaNPUD has 500 members. In 2012 the minister for Health and Social Welfare informed that Tanzania was home to 25,000 heroin users, however, according to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), there are more than 500,000 heroin users in East Africa whereby nearly 60 per cent may live in Tanzania.

Backs against the wall

In the streets of Tandika, groups of men gather in a sphere of restlessness at house corners. With their backs against the wall they sit bowed over cardboard boxes where they blend ‘kokteili’, partly shielded from by-passers, wind and dust. During mornings and evenings men gather in drug rooms along narrow, sandy pathways to smoke and inject heroin.

Heroin in Dar es Salaam is easily accessible as the city functions as an entry point for drugs from Afghanistan on the trade route towards Europe. According UNODC, this “southern route” of drug trade has become more common in recent years. The World Drug Report of 2015 by UNODC tells that heroin from Afghanistan is increasingly moved across the Indian Ocean on dhows to Tanzania and Kenya. While some of the heroin is smuggled onwards to Europe and South Africa, some of it enters the East African market and particularly ends up in Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Mombasa, according to The Economist.

Edward hopes that TaNPUD can help change the perception of drug users as mentally unstable outsiders and create a better understanding of the lives of drug users. “Education is needed to let people know that drug users are not crazy,” he says.

His organisation advocates for better medical and legal treatment for drug users, and he points out that it is crucial to let people know that addiction is a disease, not a crime. Last year TaNPUD held sessions in secondary schools to inform students about the effects of drug use with support from UNESCO.

“Normally, the youth is not taught about drugs at all. We want to push the government to adopt this as part of the syllabus,” Edward says. He hopes that education will erase the perception of drugs as something smart and street legal.

Generation of drug users

“There is a new generation of kids who have started to use drugs. They’re only 15 to 17 years old. It seems like drugs are considered cool on the streets, it is considered smart,” he says.

In Tandika, heroin is part of the life in the streets and behind the walls. Edward knows the streets, the drug camps and the hiding places as his home. But he has not always walked along these labyrinthic paths. He first encountered drugs as a teenager in the 1980s in one of the prestigious schools in Dar es Salaam.

His friends were living a life in the fast track where drugs, alcohol and fancy cars were features of their daily lives. Edward took part in the escapades and he remembers how he imported heroin hidden in porcelain panda bears from China with a friend. Later he went to the United States to study but here he stepped into the night life of New York where drugs and alcohol were essential elements of life. Crack cocaine became a substance in his existence.

In 1996 he was sent back to Tanzania after a period of rehabilitation in Minneapolis. Back in Dar es Salaam he survived off giving private lessons in English, but drugs and alcohol did not leave his life and he continued to smoke as well as sell marijuana. In 2010, he got involved in community work in Temeke and reached out to drug users through the organisation Medecins du Monde. But in 2013 he developed a heroin addiction himself. He was surrounded by heroin users and he wished to try their side of the world. But he couldn’t hold back.

“Heroin makes you relax, the heartbeat goes down and you feel peaceful and sedated. It stops the pain and if you feel hungry you’re not hungry anymore,” he says. Edward has stepped down his heroin doses but he is not always the master of his own body. The heroin can give him “a high” but on other days it merely works as a painkiller.

“I am controlling my dose. I need to keep it that way. But some days I master the heroin, and some days it masters me,” he says.

He explains that his body develops into a mode where it needs heroin to be without pain. He points at the light switch in his room and says “People think it is just as easy as turning the lights off. But if you stop immediately you will have severe pains, diarrhoea and vomiting. I want to stop but it is difficult,” he says.