Heroine Epidemic Has Taken Over an Island Paradise

Some 10% of the local population in the tropical island nation of Seychelles is dependent on heroin in what is now an epidemic, according to the country's government.  It is so bad that foreign workers are having to be brought in to do the work that drug-dependent locals cannot. 

Even President Wavel Ramkalawan acknowledges that "the drug situation is very bad".  "At this point in time, per capita, as far as consumption of heroin is concerned, Seychelles is number one in the world. And this is not a statistic that gives me personally great pleasure."

In Victoria, every morning a white van with a distribution window on its side makes several stops around the city, where long queues form as people from all walks of life wait to get methadone.  For many Seychellois though, this daily dose is nothing more than a free morning hit which is incredibly dangerous. Using methadone and heroin at the same time can lead to a fatal overdose.

Taking methadone without a detox plan and counseling is rarely a good long-term recovery solution. Despite this, political decisions have led to the closure of all residential rehabilitation centers across the islands. The president, who has been in office for two years now, blames his predecessors for the lack of much needed in-patient care.  He says that politics got in the way of dealing with the issue under the previous administration. "But we have received a grant from the UAE to build a proper rehabilitation centre. And so we are going in that direction," Ramkalawan says.

The problem in Seychelles is so bad because the islands are caught up in well-established trafficking routes from Afghanistan and Iran to East Africa and Europe - but President Ramkalawan says the issue was exacerbated when a group of Iranian drug traffickers were incarcerated in the country.  "When they were here, they developed their network. After that, there were more Seychellois involved in the drug trade from Iran, and now today we find ourselves putting in so many resources just to fight those Iranian dhows coming into our waters to sell their poison."

Heroin mostly comes into Seychelles by boat - through its vast, porous water borders. With more than a million square kilometers of territorial seas, smugglers have easy access.  Once it makes land, it is largely sold out of small, improvised shops at the back of people's homes in the country's many ghettos.  It is basically a cottage industry, and whole communities are involved.  Drive five minutes off any main street - past the fancy hotels and expensive restaurants - and you can see for yourself. This drug is everywhere, and the fear is, worse is yet to come. While heroin remains the front runner, for now at least because it is relatively cheap, there are new players on the market. Crack cocaine and crystal meth are both beginning to be used and neither drug can be treated with methadone.