Rehabilitation and relapse of a young female addict in Oman

Energy Monday 27/February/2017 21:40 PM
By: Times News Service
Rehabilitation and relapse of a young female addict in Oman

Read here: Don’t suffer in silence, doctors advise drug addicts in Oman
Muscat: In a year, Noor’s addiction evolved from smoking hashish to shooting up morphine. She was only 15.
“I was like an undercover addict in high school. Nobody knew that I used drugs, but I knew everybody who did,” Noor said.
Now 21, Noor has been in and out of treatment centres in three different countries.
“I wasn’t allowed out all of the time, and so they would slip the drugs under the door, and I would slip the money. I wasn’t free to fully engage in my addiction, and so I kept thinking, it isn’t going to happen to me. But, not everybody who smokes a joint ends up with a needle in their arm.”
Suffering from depression and an eating disorder, Noor knew of the consequences of her actions. Her father also passed away at a young age because of a drug overdose, but that didn’t stop her.
“All the pain was gone, but only for a moment.”
It was a long journey in and out of recovery for Noor. At her heaviest drug use stage, Noor was injecting up to eight times a day, going through five bags a day – alone. With friends, they would go through a dozen of the bags. Each bag holds as much powder as a pinch of salt, and costs around OMR10.
After graduating from private school, Noor left the country for her studies. Within a few weeks, she was back in the drug scene, deeper than ever.
“As soon as I landed, I was looking and thinking about the drug. It was only downhill from there. I failed university because of my addiction and depression. Even if you jail or lock up an addict, eventually they will find a way to use,” she said.
“I was jailed for a month, but instead of prolonging my sentence, I was sent to treatment. I spent five months in India, one year in Egypt and was clean the whole time.”
For Noor, the environment she was in contributed to her relapse.
“I go to treatment, work on myself and come back to the same environment which helped form my addiction in the first place. Instead of support, I receive judgment. As a girl, they say I shouldn’t be doing this and that it’ll ruin my reputation. They think of it as how will society look at this opposed to is my child hurting?
“So many stigmas make it so much harder for women to get clean. Society looks at success through professions and reputation, but an addict is an addict,” she said.