Heroin use hits poorest in Ugandan slums

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."