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Gasoline: A child’s drug of choice in Angola focus 01/18/2011

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Gasoline: A child’s drug of choice in Angola

focus

01/18/2011
LUANDA — An intoxicated boy shuffles along a teeming street in Luanda casually gulping vapors from a plastic bottle that contains gasoline, children’s drug of choice in Africa’s top oil-producing country.

Earth’s “black gold” has fast-tracked Angola from the ravages of war to the heights of an emerging regional economy but in this capital city its main derivative has become a gateway drug that brings misery to poor communities.

Easy access to gasoline, typically sold from homes in lemonade bottles, has given rise to substance abuse — with addicts as young as 10-years-old, in a country where rehabilitation resources are scarce.

Users are mainly homeless children and delinquents, whose families bore the brunt of Angola’s nearly three-decade civil war which ended in 2002..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110118com7.html

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