Alcohol and drugs are two words not often associated with students in the UAE, yet they are part of a seedy world that few get to see.
Worldwide research reveals that recreational dabbling in alcohol and marijuana serves as the gateway to harder drugs. However, in the UAE it all starts with butane — also known as cigarette lighter fuel.
Ahmad Bilal, 24, is a recent graduate from a prominent university in the UAE. He began sniffing glue and inhaling butane and paint thinner when he was 13. "For Dh20 you could get high for two days," said Bilal. "A bunch of people would get together, chip in to buy those things and go to someone's house," he added.
He was later imprisoned in Dubai for nine months, at age 19, for the possession and use of controlled substances, including hashish and heroin — while enrolled in his second year of university.
"Looking back now, I don't know how I managed not to get caught for six years," he said. Having originally approached his high school drug dealers for hallucinogenic substances, Bilal found himself gaining access to even more substances.
"I was extremely willing to experiment. I'd read up about this stuff online and realised I wanted it," he said. "The more I pestered them [school-yard dealers] for it the more they supplied," he added.
Bilal was eventually approached by a drug dealer to become a hashish street vendor. He refused, but along the way made friends with Tarek, a wealthy Palestinian teenager three years his senior.
"He [Tarek] had money but he didn't mind spending on me, he got me anything I ever wanted," said Bilal. "The next two years of my life were hell because if I wasn't using I was recovering," he added.
"Tarek told me never to shoot heroin with a needle, only to snort it, but the funny thing is, by the time I was 17, he'd passed away from an overdose," said Bilal. "His death really messed me up, I thought it would result in me stopping, but I never did."
Over the next two years, while using, Bilal somehow managed to graduate from high school with honours and was awarded a scholarship to pursue his higher education. "Whether this means educational requirements are really low or not I can't say… but I did my O levels, AS Levels, SATs and TOEFL and got extremely good grades," he said.
During his first year at university, Bilal continued to use heroin ‘recreationally'. "I didn't think I had a problem before I went to jail… part of it is there would be times I'd have no access and be fine. I would be a little irritable but I wouldn't stress," he said. However, upon his arrest and conviction in 2007 after a Dubai police drug raid, ‘recreational use' became out-and-out abuse.
Within 72 hours of Bilal's arrest he was charged and sentenced to six months' imprisonment but served nine months due to deportation complications because of his Palestinian nationality. He was held in a Dubai police station for the first month-and-a-half of his sentence, while awaiting transfer to the Dubai central prison.
Alcohol is no better
"The very first thing the psychologist tried to do is put me on anti-depressants," said Mohammad Ahmad, a self-professed alcoholic graduate. "I knew I wasn't crazy, I just wanted to get messed up all the time," added the Emirati. "The only way I was able to stay sober was talking to people with the same problem as me." Ahmad now attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings in Dubai. Ahmad, 26, has been arrested three times and jailed twice for drunk driving. He said he had been drinking every day since the age of 17 and reached a point where he would spend Dh1,000 a night on alcohol.
"If I didn't drink I'd have the shakes," he said. "I would go to work and occasionally drink during lunch which would sometimes last until 3am… or I'd wait until I finished work to go home and change and then hit the bar," he added.
"I knew I needed to go to work to pay for drink and debts accumulated because of alcohol," said Ahmad.
"When I was arrested after a drunken driving car accident for the third time, at that point I was hugely in debt… I'd maxed out all my credit cards," he said. "The money coming in I'd pay back on the cards and reuse them," he added.
"I was feeling bad about it because my family found out again and it got to the point they would disown me, when I was found asleep on a bench by the same policemen who'd arrested me the third time," said Ahmad. Having been sober for almost a year, he says it was hard to leave that life behind.
Access is difficult
"Hard drugs are really expensive here so most people, especially the youth, don't have access to them. Most of them stay at the butane, paint thinners level," said Bilal.
"If they graduate to anything, it's prescription drugs… that's what people abuse here," he added. However, he said it is people with access to money and time to spare like the unemployed, recent graduates. "Those are the people who can buy real drugs," he said.
Echoing Bilal's statement is Dr Major Juma Sultan, head of the awareness and protection section of the anti-narcotics department at Dubai Police.
"In the UAE we don't have a lot of hard drug users, our problem now is more with prescription drug tablets which give you the same feelings and effects as heroin," he said.
"They are smuggled into the country illegally and in big quantities. However, prescription medicines are not illegal, so when we catch it with abusers it is not criminal to keep the tablets on their person," he said, adding that drug tests for prescription drugs bring up clear results — which is also a problem.
However, Sultan said for hard drug users there is a lack of treatment for addiction and rehabilitation. The only known centre is the National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) in Abu Dhabi, which only admits Emirati males.
"There used to be a rehabilitation centre in Al Awir but now that has become a special centre for women and children," said Sultan.
— Names have been changed to protect identities.
Information is crucial
A professor from the American University of Sharjah (AUS) and an addiction researcher in the region have begun a research project to gather raw information about the alcohol and drug use habits of UAE youth.Thomas Alibrandi, Director of the Intensive English Programme, and author of Young Alcoholics, believes gathering such data is fundamental to measuring the scale of a possible problem - among what is classed as a high-risk age group of 15-21.
"We are facing a situation where there is a complete lack of data," said the researcher who spoke on the basis of anonymity. "There are several databases in terms of clinical populations…but for young adults and teenagers there is no data available which is definitely something important to address in order to know the scale of the problem," she said. "I can tell from the way some students are acting or the way they look that they are loaded," said Alibrandi. "The eyes don't lie and it was obvious they were either drinking or using drugs."
"During my career, I have taught these topics [substance abuse] and several times students have come forward and been explicit about it," the addiction researcher said.She said the prevalence of substance abuse may be lower in the UAE than in other countries. "This could be due to several reasons but we don't know this - especially for young people - we don't know anything, so the research is to address this extreme gap of knowledge," she added.
