John Mirembe has stolen his father’s expensive four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser and is selling it piece by piece to fund his heroin-Smoking addiction.

So far the battery, spare wheel and jack have gone to garages in Uganda’s capital Kampala. Mirembe, 25, says he will buy them back. The addicts crowded around him are not so sure.

“How can you just give away your father’s car?” says David, a denim-shirted smoker, shaking his head and staring at the mud floor before lighting a match under a foil wrap of brown powder and inhaling the fumes through a straw.

Huddled in a tiny shack in one of the city’s poorest slums, they are victims of a global heroin trade experts say is increasingly penetrating Africa.

Trafficking in the drug and its abuse are rising in many countries, fuelling crime and increasing the threat from HIV/AIDS, the United Nations said in a report this month.

None of the addicts in Kivulu, who buy their heroin from a 33-year-old woman carrying a baby on her back, has heard of the report by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).

But all of them say heroin is destroying their lives.

SYNDICATES

Dougie, 24, has wounds on his head and a blood-red eye after he was beaten by people who caught him stealing mirrors off cars to pay for his habit.

The smokers often fight each other for the drug, which enters east Africa by air and sea, mostly from Afghanistan.

The government strengthened drug laws in 2003, but has largely failed to stem a rising tide of heroin use. Residents say corrupt officials turn a blind eye for bribes.

Couriers have been caught at Uganda’s international airport carrying up to 1.8 kg of heroin pellets in their stomachs. The drugs are normally in transit to Europe or, to a lesser extent, the United States.

But senior police officers say an unknown amount stays in the country and is sold by syndicates including Ugandan, Nigerian, Senegalese, German and British criminals.

SERENITY

At the Serenity Centre, a quiet former residence in a city suburb, Uganda’s luckiest addicts are given a chance to regain a normal life at the country’s first rehabilitation clinic.

Andrew, a 27-year-old Ugandan, used to smoke $30 worth of heroin every day, about two grams. He has not used the drug since spending seven months at the centre in 2002.

“By the time I went in I was stealing from my parents, I was stealing from the home, I had threatened to kill my whole family and held a knife to our house girl’s throat. I had become a very serious bad guy,” he said. “Now, I am okay.”

But at a cost of $25 a day, with a typical course at Serenity lasting 180 days, only the wealthy get that chance in a country where most people live on less than $1 a day.

In many more cases, sufferers are treated with suspicion by relatives and neighbours who do not understand alcohol and drug addiction, said counsellor Salvatore Vundru.

“People try to link addiction and witchcraft because they are scared of the delusions and physical withdrawals addicts can go through,” he told Reuters.

SMUGGLING

The addicts in Kivulu have little hope of ever benefiting from counselling. Instead, they talk about quitting heroin and getting rich - perhaps by taking up offers from smugglers of $6,000 to work as human mules carrying the drug by plane.

They are not alone in being tempted by quick cash. Two years ago police in Pakistan arrested a 70-year-old Nigerian as he tried to take a television packed with six kilogrammes of heroin onto a flight to Uganda.

Until lax controls at air and seaports are addressed, along with the region’s inadequate drug laws, drug trafficking will remain a growing east African problem, the United Nations says.

The numbers of victims - mostly young men like those slumped glassy-eyed in the filth of Kivulu - will also grow.

From the slum’s AK-47 Bar, 23-year-old David watches his dealer padding back up the hill in plastic sandals, baby still strapped firmly to her back.

“To look at her, you cannot know she is rich,” he says, dragging on a cigarette butt. “She can earn more than $250 a day. Of course, she passes most of that on to her bosses, but still,” he shakes his head again.

David, who was arrested by police last month and held for four days until his mother paid for him to be released, says he dreams of travelling to the United States to make a fresh start with his brother, a successful doctor.

“He has been asking me to come out, but first I need to stop smoking this thing. My life would be so much better if I could stop heroin. But I can’t. It is destroying us,” he says.