The National Drug Law Agency, NDLEA, has raised alarm over the increasing figure of youths in Enugu State who are caught in the web of drug abuse.
The NDLEA said on Tuesday on Enugu that more than 360,000 youths in the state are trapped in the scourge of hard drugs.
The agency pointed out that the figure represents about 13.4% of the youth population in the state.
The worrisome statistics raises a deepening public health and security crisis in the southeastern states, where narcotic consumption has aggressively breached traditional boundaries, trickling down from tertiary institutions into secondary and primary school classrooms.
The revelations were made during the MTN Anti-Substance Abuse Programme (ASAP) Stakeholders’ Conference at the International Conference Centre in Enugu.
With the theme: “It’s Everyone’s Fight,” the event identified the urgent need for structural interventions to rescue youngest demography of Nigeria’s population from the grips of narcotic dependency.
The Deputy Commander of Narcotics and Drug Demand Reduction of the NDLEA, Enugu State Command, Mr. Owunwa Ibezimako, who spoke at the event, warned that the data reflected a severe breakdown of societal guardrails.
He noted that the survey, conducted jointly by the NDLEA and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), clearly puy illicit substances as the main driver for the regional insecurity plaguing the region.
“Drugs and crime are not strange bedfellows.
“For every organised crime recorded in Nigeria, drugs are either the enablers or the enhancers.
“This conference could not have come at a better time because the vulnerability of our children is scaling up at a speed that demands immediate, aggressive containment.”
Ibezimako highlighted that under the national leadership of Brig.-Gen. Mohammed Buba Marwa (rtd.), the NDLEA has rolled out sweeping demand-reduction frameworks, including the War Against Drug Abuse (WADA) campaign and the Save Our Families initiative.
He revealed that a strict national policy is now active, mandating rigorous drug tests for newly admitted university students and incoming government workers, while a fresh preventive curriculum is being pushed for deployment in local schools.
The Executive Director of the MTN Foundation, Mrs. Odunayo Sanya, spoke on the urgency of the situation, stating the organisation’s investments aimed at insulating Nigerian youths from early-stage exposure to illicit substances.
She said that the MTN Foundation, through its interventions since 2004, has invested over N33 billion in transformative health, education, and youth empowerment initiatives.
She stated that such interventions have directly impacted more than 33 million lives nationwide.
Emotionally reflecting on the human cost of the drug crisis, she decried how young talents are erased once they are lured into local drug dens, where they are stripped of their identities and given strange aliases by syndicates, effectively killing their past lives.
”When they get into those dens, they give them a new identity.
“You can go in there and say you are looking for them by their government names, but nobody knows who they are.
“The person you knew died the day they stepped into that place.
“That is the tragedy that fuels our fire at the MTN Foundation to ensure we shrink the numbers of first-time users.”
Sanya emphasized that because a staggering portion of Nigeria’s population centers around a median age of 17, human capital remains the nation’s supreme asset—far eclipsing any mineral resources buried in the soil.
She pointed out that providing economic alternatives is vital to keeping youths away from peer-driven vices, prompting the Foundation to offer free digital and tech training via the MTN Skills Academy to prepare teenagers for the modern global workforce.
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