ONCE JUST A SUPPLIER, NIGERIA DEVELOPS HEROIN WOES

Ex-dealer's sad story shows how drug trade comes home to roost

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Before he checked into a drug rehabilitation program,
Emmanuel Okocha was a soldier in Nigeria's army of heroin traffickers who
slowly got hooked on his own product.

Okocha discovered the drug while he was a college student in England, where
he made easy money smuggling it. After he returned home to this
impoverished West African country and found no jobs waiting, he found it
hard to stop dealing.

His addiction did not develop until later, when the drug became common on
Lagos' streets and dirt cheap in smoky back-room heroin dens.

A government crackdown on the international heroin trade made the drug more
plentiful locally.

"The traffickers just had to get rid of it," Okocha said at the rehab home
he shares with 14 other recovering addicts.

According to international experts and people like Okocha, a domestic drug
problem is the inevitable outcome of Nigeria's having supplied the
developed world's habits for more than a decade.

"For 10 years it was not a big problem here. It was just transiting," said
Shariq bin Raza, chief of the United Nations Drug Control Program office in
Nigeria. "But slowly there is a trickle-down effect, and we fear that drug
abuse is on the rise."

Nigeria's growing problem also is a consequence of the global war on drugs.

Pressured by the U.S. and other nations, the Nigerian military regime
lately has been more serious about stopping the flow of hard drugs through
the country from Southeast Asia and South America.

That means more drugs stay in Nigeria, which is one of several
drug-supplying countries that have developed domestic problems.

For years, efforts to control the drug trade were hampered by
recriminations between drug-consuming nations like the U.S. and supplier
nations like Nigeria and Colombia, with each side blaming the other for the
problem.

But after a United Nations special meeting on drugs last month,
participants said a consensus began to develop that nations no longer can
be so easily categorized.

Just as the manufacturing of synthetic drugs has turned consumer nations
into producers, nations that grow coca or opium or traffic in them
eventually become consumer nations too.

Experts say Pakistan is developing an addiction problem because of opium
trafficking out of Afghanistan by refugees.

In West Africa, Ghana, Togo and Guinea are beginning to see domestic drug
abuse because of the Nigerian-based transit industry.

"We're telling these countries (that) you can't worry about just being a
transit country and not having your own problem, because it will come,"
said one Western diplomat who works on drug issues in the region. "Just
about every West African country is beginning to experience this."

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say Nigerians continue to
dominate the illicit shipment of Southeast Asian heroin to the U.S and
South American cocaine to Europe.

Sometimes they move Colombian cocaine back across the Atlantic to the U.S.

Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the world's heroin is moved or
controlled by Nigerians, officials say.

In recent years, up to 80 percent of those arrested for trying to smuggle
heroin through New York's Kennedy International Airport were Nigerians, and
a 1996 probe revealed that Chicago was the final market for a major
Nigerian smuggling ring.

Until recently, Nigeria's only domestic drug problem was "Indian hemp," the
local name for the marijuana that is abundantly grown across West Africa.

The harder drugs began to arrive during the last decade, although at first
they were too expensive for most Nigerians.

In 1994, the corrupt Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency was taken over by
Gen. Musa Bamaiyi, who had some success at cleaning up the agency as he
increased interdiction efforts.

Five hundred people were fired, and confiscated drugs stopped disappearing
in wholesale quantities.

Diplomats say that the agency still is mismanaged and underfunded, but its
operations have improved.

The U.S. denies aid to Nigeria because it was declared uncooperative in the
war on drugs, but diplomats say that is mainly because the regime refuses
to extradite six suspects wanted in the U.S.

Nigerian drug agency spokesman Biodun Adesola said the agency has 400
vehicles, 54 speedboats and 8 sniffer dogs. Outside the headquarters, the
courtyard was jammed with impounded cars.

"The government is doing its level-best, but no matter what we do, it's
still not enough," Adesola said. "We are not saying everything is
eradicated, no. It is cheap out there on the streets."

Smugglers have developed new methods, such as hiding drugs in shipping
containers full of textiles or sliding them inside hollowed-out timber
beams.

Nevertheless, as exporting became tougher, the traffickers began flooding
the local market, making drugs affordable by diluting them or selling them
in "pinches," which is just enough for one pipe full.

They also began paying their couriers in drugs.

The government so far has done little to control consumption or to help
addicts, and it can provide no statistics on the extent of the problem.

Many church-based rehabilitation projects have sprung up, but they have to
rely on volunteers and charitable donations.

At the Christ Against Drug Addiction Ministry, Okocha and his fellow
addicts make shoes with donated sewing machines and try to overcome their
habits through song and prayer.

Many tell the same story, how they lost their families and wasted good
educations after helping supply faraway drug habits.

Okocha, 41, boasted of his knowledge about the American drug market before
he began straightening himself out six months ago.

"The brown (heroin) sells like mad in Chicago," Okocha said. "The best
thing is to get it to Europe and America, but I started going into my own
supply. Here they don't teach you about the ills of drugs, like in the
U.S."

Ikite Sedun, an older man, said he got addicted while working as a security
guard at a Lagos hotel casino.

A visitor from Oklahoma used to pay him to go out and buy heroin, he said,
and he eventually tried the drug.

"I originally bought it only to give to the white man," Sedun said. "At
first, I was able to buy a car with the money I made, but then I had to
sell everything and I was starting to sleep on the road."

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)