Wee Makes 4,000 Mad

Welcome to the open cocaine and wee market in Ghana� could easily be the imaginary billboard that greets every visitor to the country upon moving around and witnessing the increasingly open wee smoking and alcohol abuse in parts of different cities of the country. That market, "Today�s" investigations revealed, is open 24x7 with its customers patronizing them all the time, but mostly in the evenings and after work to purchase the illicit drugs that has been the bane of many a youth. Mostly located near public toilets, thick bushes, unfrequented portions of railway lines, and even within air-conditioned rooms of plush hotels in the cities, the wee market, "Today" uncovered, serves all manner of persons in society, including the highly religious and some opinion and political leaders in the country. The involvement of such high class members of society in the vices of wee-smoking and drug use is acting as negative motivation to the youth, who then learn how to trade in the drugs and/or imbibe the behaviour of using them while in school. The wee, from weed, which our society allows to be advertised on commercial vehicles and on certain radio programmes as the �wee of wisdom,� has failed to live up to that expectation and is rather the cause of a good percentage of mental illnesses in the country. According to official figures, the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, popularly known as Asylum, recorded an estimate of four thousand patients who went mad from smoking wee and abusing other forms of drugs including alcohol in 2012.