Psychoactive drug kush has prompted a wave of deaths, mental health issues and the digging up of graves.

Sierra Leone’s president has declared a national emergency over rampant drug abuse.

Kush, a psychoactive blend of addictive substances, has been prevalent in the country for years.

President Julius Maada Bio called the drug a “death trap” and said it posed an “existential crisis”.

One of the drug’s many ingredients is human bones - security has been tightened in cemeteries to stop addicts digging up skeletons from graves.

Groups of mostly young men sitting on street corners with limbs swollen by kush abuse is a common sight in Sierra Leone.

  • Nurgle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    Cause smoking formaldehyde gets you high. Take it you’ve never heard of wet, but people will dip cigs or joints in it and smoke them. Wasnt uncommon back in the day that shitty weed would be laced with it.

    Also kush is not referring to the weed strain here.

    • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      9 months ago

      Yeah kush isn’t referring to the weed here.

      It just so happens that strengthened (fentanyl/other opioid “strengthened”) weed happens to have gotten the colloquial name “Kush”, probably because it started off as people selling stronger and stronger smoke.

      Probably why they then add formaldehyde as well.

      And yeah now that you mention “wet”, I think I have heard about it sometime, but had not remembered that. Weird. I wonder how much that affected why it was in cigarettes.

      Embalming fluid reportedly produces a hallucinogenic effect and causes the cigarette to burn more slowly, potentially resulting in a prolonged high.

      https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs11/12208/index.htm

      Huh.

      But my point is rather that because it’s called kush, people smoking formaldehyde and fentanyl is being sort of associated with just the word “Kush”, which in most contexts, just refers to weed. Thus it’s the same sort of anti-cannabis drug propaganda as always.