WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-02-05 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
By Angelique Serrao
Six years ago, the average age of a first-time drug user was 19. Today it’s 10. It has become so bad that experts say every school in the country now has a drug problem and that it’s out of control.
A member of the drug training and awareness centre at the SA Police Service’s Organised Crime Unit, Jan Combrink, who has visited schools to teach children about the dangers of drug abuse, has found children as young as 4 using drugs.
Drug abuse among the youth has become so bad that chief prosecutors with the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the SAPS, drug rehabilitation centres, churches, shelters and schools have come together to form an organisation, Westsiders Against Addiction, which combines all the key players in the fight against drug abuse among children.
| ‘If the school is denying they have a problem, those are the schools to avoid’ |
“Before, we found that children were starting on drugs like glue and dagga,” said Westsiders chairperson George Pappas. “Now kids are starting on Mandrax and heroin.
“Our children are dying at an alarming rate. The recovery rate with a heroin addict is 1 to 2 percent, which means the majority of those users will die.”
Combrink has been working with Westsiders for three years.
He says there isn’t a school he has visited which doesn’t have drug users. He said most children can name all the drugs available on the market before he starts his presentations.
“Every school has someone with drug problems,” he said. “Sometimes it is easier for a child to get drugs in a school than bumming a cigarette.
“If the school is denying they have a problem, those are the schools to avoid as a parent. Those are the cold, hard facts.”
Johan Venter, a chief prosecutor with the NPA, said he couldn’t sit around anymore and do nothing about the increasing number of children he sees in court because of drug abuse.
“There was one case where a boy of 7 was in court for house robbery and murder. He started using drugs at 4 years old.
“His parents were using him for crime, and the drugs gave him courage to do what he had to do,” Venter said.
“We need to equip our children with the knowledge that if they go down this path, it will lead to destruction. These children are being prosecuted because they are sick and they are being used by adults.”
Venter began looking into helping drug addicts when he started an organisation with Combrink called Operation 360. The organisation was started to help child prostitutes, but the more they delved into prostitution, the more they realised that children were going down that road because they were drug addicts.
“If you visit a fancy hotel, you can’t believe how many child prostitutes there are in that street,” Venter said.
A fellow chief prosecutor, Matric Luphondo, said that despite the existence of specialised drug courts, so many children were coming into court with drug problems, he realised that no single organisation could deal with this problem on its own.
“As a prosecutor, I realised we have to become more outcomes based,” said Luphondo. “Putting a child through the courts doesn’t solve anything. He will just come out again and carry on. We need to prevent that docket from ever coming into court.”
One of the ways Westsiders decided to combat crime was to do training in Gauteng schools. With a grant of R900 000 from the Westbank Fund, the organisation is going into more than 160 schools in Gauteng.
The first school to experiment on the programme was Allen Glen High School on the West Rand, which has formed and trained leaders as drug monitors to look out for signs of drug use among their peers. Last year the school identified 11 pupils who had drug problems. They have now been put through the rehabilitation programme.
Combrink said another positive point to the programme was that children were alerting the SAPS to the dealers in their area, and they were able to make convictions.
Whenever he goes to a school, children come forward and give him the names of dealers, he added.