I started smoking ganja at nine – Man recounts how he was lured into habit

An addict who is recovering from smoking marijuana has revealed he got drenched in so much ganja as the drug is popularly called at a tender age he did not know himself any longer at a point.

The resident of Abesim in Sunyani, Emmanuel Yeboah alias “There Flow,” said smoking ganja in his community was as common as drinking coffee in Brazil and he took his first try when he was just nine.

Narrating his journey to recovery on The Day Show with Berla Mundi on TV3, Yeboah revealed that he took weed pieces from an uncle who was a heavy smoker and had his first joint but the feeling afterwards will deter him for a while but he will shortly return to embark on his addictive journey.

“My first experience was when I was around nine years old and I used to sleep in a room with an uncle of mine and he smokes so I took the pieces from his ash tray and smoked it.”

He said though he saw his uncle smoke weed all the time, it was a normal practice to see people openly smoking in the community. “It is normal in Abesim. Even women and children smoked, it is normal,” he said.

“I always wanted to get high, every minute of my life unless maybe I am asleep,” he stressed.

Yeboah shockingly revealed that he became a heavy smoker at age eleven after he was accused of being a wizard after he entered his auntie’s room through the window which sunk him into depression and he had to adopt the weed ghettos and make them his home.

“I decided to go to my uncle who used to live with an auntie of mine after my father wanted to beat me. When I got there, there was nobody in the house so I passed through the window and entered the house so when I was coming out, someone met me and said ‘eeii, small boy what are you doing here?’and I said the woman who lived in the house was my auntie. And when my auntie came, he accused me of being a wizard because I entered the room without breaking in and I was taken to a pastor to be prayed for and rumours spread in the community that I was a wizard.”

He said he became so addicted to smoking weed he could do nothing without smoking. He said it became a part of his daily routine to smoke before going to school and even when he is in class, the little chance he gets is used to take a joint in any nearby bush.

“In the early morning before you go to school, you go and smoke and you go to school and if you are in school and maybe if there is a little chance, you can hide yourself and smoke. You wake up and from our house to the school, there is a distance so you pass at the ghetto and purchase the weed, smoke small before you get to the school.”

The former addict said things spiralled out of control when he moved to Accra to stay with his father only for the father to disappear after a while.

He however said he had what you can call a brief break when he got to the Ghana Secondary and Technical School (GSTS), Takoradi because he was confined due to the rules at the boarding house and moreover, he didn’t know where to get the weed to buy until he heard rumours of a senior who also smoked and he befriended him and that will end his smoke break.

“If you go to a new school, you don’t think about it [the weed] too much but I heard that there was one senior who smoked who was in form 2 and there was this day that I confronted him and said if you know how to do it [smoke weed], let’s go.”

He said while in school, he had to steal items like student mattresses, phones, and other valuable items so he could get money to buy drugs to feed his cravings.

“I had stolen on several occasions. I can steal anything. I can steal your mattress, I can steal a phone, even somebody’s sneakers so I can get weed.”

He had grown immune and used to weed overtime. It wasn’t getting him as high as it used to it get him so he migrated to using cocaine which got him arrested on the day he wrote his last paper at the WASSCE.

“The day I completed the WASSCE, I got arrested and detained in cell for almost a week before my uncle came and bailed me. I was into cocaine and it was very expensive so we went and stole some calculators and took them to the ghetto to sell but the price they wanted to buy them were not good so we brought them back and one junior went and reported us so the police came in and arrested us because at that time we were no longer students of the school.”

Yeboah’s sponsor at the Sunyani Technical University could no longer take it when he realized all the monies he had been taken from him was not used in sponsoring his electrical engineering dream but rather on weed and cocaine so he cut him funding and he had to drop out in Level 200.

He lost his father along the line and used his portion of the inheritance to build a drinking spot for himself but will lose all that too to drugs. That is when he realized it was time for him to act and make attempts to quit smoking.

As it is with drugs and the attempts to quit and the withdrawal symptoms that comes with it, Yeboah will slip back severally to do drugs until he met a pastor who is the senior brother of an old friend who decided to help him and put him through rehab.