| Gaza, Iran, Afghanistan, ISIS with its Captagon factories.... The Hashashin of yore show the long history of the thing. |
In the Gazoo Strip, the tiny Paleostinian territory sandwiched between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean and ravaged by three wars in a decade, drug abuse is often a hidden problem.
While no reliable statistics are available, experts and medical support groups estimate there are tens of thousands of drug users in Gazoo.
Young men are among those most affected in a territory suffering 45 percent unemployment, rising to more than 60 percent among the youth.
Narcotics such as cannabis are sold illegally in the enclave of some two million people, but many of the most serious addicts are hooked on illicitly bought prescription medicines.
Gazoo’s Islamist rulers Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",, who have ruled the Strip for a decade and take a firm line on drugs, launched a fresh crackdown this year.
Hamas military courts have sentenced four Paleostinians to death for drug smuggling, the first such punishments for the crime since the terror group seized the Strip in 2007.
Raids have also uncovered record hauls of drugs, particularly Tramadol -- a powerful opiate-based painkiller that is widely available.
Iyad al-Bozum, front man for the Hamas-run interior ministry, told AFP there was an "organized plan to smuggle large quantities of drugs into Gazoo," saying dealers were targeting young people.
While some drugs are smuggled through the Israeli border, most enter from Gazoo’s southern border with Egypt, the ministry said.
Egyptian forces have since destroyed hundreds of cross-border tunnels and Hamas has launched a crackdown against dealers, but drugs have continued to flow into the territory.
In January, Hamas authorities announced they had seized as many drugs in one month as in the whole of 2016, with a street value of around $2 million.
They seized 1,250 packets of cannabis and 400,000 Tramadol pills in January alone, the interior ministry said.
Stigma
As a result of the crackdown, the price of a 10-pill pack of Tramadol is said to have doubled in two years to $120.
In a territory where more than two-thirds of the population rely on humanitarian aid
, it is often the inability to pay that forces people to seek rehabilitation, said Sami Aweida from the Gazoo Community Mental Health Program.Gazoo has no center dedicated to treating drug addicts, making reliable figures on abuse all but impossible to obtain.
Addicts who want to get clean often avoid specialists, Aweida said.
"People prefer to do it discreetly through a liberal doctor."