How I beat my addiction to drugs, sex

They do not give a uniform answer but one common response from recovering addicts, when asked about the moment they decided to reform, is that they had become enemies of the society.

A recovering sex and alcohol addict, Mr Titus Ndiritu, recalls that the transformative moment came when he stripped naked. His consumption of alcohol to mask the depression caused by deviant sexual behaviour saw him slip into psychosis and one day he undressed in public.

Ms Deborah Were, who abused heroin for more than 10 years, says she sought treatment after something jolted her to her senses, prodding her about the need to play a motherly role to her children, some of whom had been taken to an orphanage because she could not be trusted to raise them.

And, for Mr James Kimondio, who was in the rut for 19 years while abusing bhang, heroin, among other hard drugs, the Road-to-Damascus moment came when the government launched a countrywide fight against drug abuse.

Deborah Were

Ms Were, 37, a resident of Mombasa County, started using heroin at 17 when she was a high school student.

“I became hooked to heroin after realising I was expectant. I was using it to relieve my stress. A friend gave me heroin to forget my sorrows. Little did I know I was digging my own grave. After tasting only once, my life changed,” she says.

She terminated her education and started engaging in prostitution to sustain her addiction. The father of the child she was carrying in her womb was an addict too, and was later killed in a drug-related dispute.

Months after she delivered, her baby girl was taken by the family of her late boyfriend. “I continued living a wasted life and became pregnant three more times. The children were taken away from me (second, third and lastborn) because I couldn’t take care of them. Some were taken to a children’s home,” she says.

Ms Were was arrested and jailed many times because of her involvement in drugs. She decided to ditch the habit when thoughts about her children consumed her. “I decided to enrol for rehabilitation for my children’s sake. I wanted to live for them; to see a changed person and reunite with them,” she says.

To ensure she recovered, she enrolled at the Reachout Centre Trust in Mombasa County. “I was enrolled in the methadone programme.  It has been close to two years since I last used illicit drugs.

“This is an achievement I celebrate after spending more than 10 years in bondage. I am happy that I never relapsed,” she says. Her firstborn is now 21 years old. She says she saw the daughter on Facebook recently after 20 years of separation. The second-born is in Italy, having been taken by her father’s relatives.

Two other children, aged 12 and 11, are at a children’s home. “I can now visit and spend a good time with my two children at the home. Soon I will live and take care of them,” says the mother of four.

Ms Were now works as a peer educator at Reachout Centre Trust in Mombasa Old Town. “Drug addiction is a disease. It takes over your life; you must be determined and have courage to recover from it,” she says.

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James Kimondio, 39, also a Mombasa resident, considers himself recovered after going for 17 months without consuming the hard drugs that were part of his life for 19 years.

The change came months after undergoing medically assisted therapy that involves receiving methadone, a syrup formulated to assuage an addict’s withdrawal symptoms.

“My life was a living hell due to drug and substance abuse. I have abused bhang, heroin, anti-depressants and anti-psychotic drugs for 19 years. It has been a torturous journey but I thank God for rescuing me,” he says.
He dropped out of school while in Form Two after peer pressure sucked him into drugs.

“I used to see my friends using the substance and I got influenced. I wanted to feel high,” he says.
At one point during his 19-year struggle, he was arrested and later imprisoned on a charge of preparing to commit a felony.

“While imprisoned at the Shimo La Tewa Maximum Prison, I rehabilitated myself and became clean. But when I was released from prison after serving my sentence, I went back to drugs,” he recalls.

His change would come in early 2016 when a crackdown against drugs by the government was in top gear. “I decided to seek medication in order to be rehabilitated. I really wanted to quit. I overpowered my addiction and it worked,” he says.

“My journey to recovery wasn’t easy at all but I triumphed because it was of my own volition; I wasn’t forced by anyone. I followed the doctor’s advice and the medication and counselling changed my life completely,” adds Mr Kimondio.

He started on methadone in June 2016 when he was enrolled for rehabilitation at the Coast Provincial General Hospital. “I was drug addict number 317. But when doctors went on strike, most of my friends relapsed,” he says.

He later transferred to Kisauni Health Centre, which is run by the Mombasa county government in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Mr Kimondio is married with three children and he runs a carwash business in Mombasa’s CBD.

“When the urge to use drugs hits me, I get engaged in my casual work,” he says. From the recovery process, he has made an emphatic observation. “Although methadone cures addiction by 20 per cent, 80 per cent is self-initiative, from psycho-social to counselling. If you want to stop addiction, don’t listen to anyone except you. Also, follow the doctor’s advice,” he says.

Mr Kimondio also wants the government to change its attitude towards drug addicts. “Whenever law enforcers see addicts in drug dens or by the roadside, they normally arrest them. But what you don’t know is that addicts are sick people who need help,” he said.

Mr Evans Oloo, who has been training addiction professionals and counselling addicts for the last 17 years, agrees with Mr Kimondio. “Addiction is a disease like diabetes or cancer,” he says. Mr Oloo is the head of training and clinical services at the Support for Addictions Prevention and Treatment in Africa (Sapta), whose headquarters are in Nairobi.

He is also the president of the Kenyan chapter of the International Society of Substance Use Professionals (Issup). He says that for an addict, there is no such word as “reformation”. The right word is “recovery”. “We say that somebody is always in recovery. That is because of the disease concept of addiction,” he tells Lifestyle.

To prove that an addict is recovering, he says, things to look out for include whether they have abstained from the habit. “Another is if they are back functioning properly in society,” he says. Relapsing into past habits is an ever-present danger and Mr Oloo advises recovering addicts to stick to their counsellors’ programme.

“It is also important to know that addiction is a relapsing disease. So, relapse is expected as one walks the journey of recovery. So that if somebody relapses, we say it’s one way of learning the best way to remain clean,” he says.

To check whether one’s addiction has reached a level where one needs help, Mr Oloo says the Cage test needs to be administered. The “C” stands for “cut down”. “If somebody has tried to cut down before and they have failed, then it shows that they have a problem,” he says.

“A” represents “angry”. “If people have been angry because of your alcohol or drugs, then it shows there is a problem,” explains Mr Oloo. “G” if for “guilty”. “If you feel guilty every time you use alcohol and drugs, then there is a problem,” he says.

The final “E” is for “eye-opener”, known in Kenyan parlance as removing the lock. “If somebody has to use alcohol for them to feel normal, or somebody has to use a drug for them to feel normal, then there is a problem,” he says. Most of the recovering addicts who spoke to Lifestyle said they were initiated into addiction in their teens, and Mr Oloo’s advice is that youth should always be given guidance. He also urges for those who store drugs to put more restrictions.

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Titus Ndiritu, 37, says he was induced into deviant sexual behaviour by their house-help when he was seven years old. She showed him how to derive pleasure from a woman’s body. He says she abused him every time she got a chance.

With such an orientation, he grew up craving sexual intercourse. In 1994, when he was in Form One, students in his high school peer group dared him to have sex after he got circumcised — so that he could prove he was man enough. He took up the challenge and did so in a bush with a schoolgirl during a drama festival.

He was neck-deep into alcohol drinking and bhang smoking when he finished Form Four in 1997 at a mixed school. He had been expelled in Form Two from his former school over his behaviour. After secondary school, he joined Mathenge Institute of Technology in Nyeri County.

But he did not stay for long because he had developed a habit of luring women to his room. Using a façade of a born-again Christian, he would convince women to his place, knowing that he had arranged his room so as to have no other furniture but his bed. In 1998, he fled from the college after he learnt police were looking for him following a sexual harassment complaint.

Mr Ndiritu’s next stop was Nairobi, where he enrolled for an accountancy course at another college. Because the sex addiction ghosts were still haunting him, he found a haven in Nairobi’s red light districts.
His perversion — which was characterised by masturbation, groping women in public places and exposing himself — at times gnawed at his conscience and he started drinking copious amounts of alcohol on top of other drugs to deal with the depression.

Ultimately, his alcohol addiction was more noticeable than his being hooked to sex. It made his parents send him to Asumbi Treatment Centre in Homa Bay County in 2004.

MISDIAGNOSIS

It did not help him much. A year later, he was taken to Jorg Ark Rehabilitation Centre in Limuru. He recovered for only a while but he relapsed soon after.

“For many years, I was always diagnosed as an alcoholic. I knew my problem was alcoholism. I was taken from one rehab to the other. But it was not working,” he tells Lifestyle.
Soon psychosis set in. Psychosis is a severe mental condition where one loses touch with reality. He remembers having many hallucinations.

Mr Ndiritu was treated at mental health facilities in Mathari and Gilgil but still there was no change.
The transformation was to come in 2009 when he was taken to the Chiromo Lane Medical Centre following his stripping incident. While talking to a counsellor on his alcohol addiction, his obsession with sex became central to the discussion.

“This counsellor discovered that the reason I was relapsing was because I had something else that was not being treated. I was just treated for alcoholism but there was something else that was making me go back to drinking, and it was the sex problem,” he says.

That started his journey to ditching his anti-social ways with the guidance of the counsellor and a doctor. “Since the other condition was discovered, I have never gone back to alcoholism,” he says. Today, Mr Ndiritu works at a rehabilitation centre in Nyahururu, Laikipia County.

“This is what has really worked for me because every day it gives me an opportunity to see patients who have gone through what I’ve faced and it reminds me every day of where I could go back,” he says. Mr Ndiritu still considers himself a recovering addict, and his philosophy is being careful.

“I know if I’m not careful, I may go back; either to sex addiction or to alcoholism,” he says. “I have stayed for quite a long time; but I may still go back to my old habit.”