Yaba - Popularly Used Drugs in Bangladesh

Introduction

I am a private tutor and one of my student is a little girl whom I teach going to her place.  Last year during the end of August, I remember going to her place one day and her maternal grandmother was staying there at that time.  While I was teaching her, her grandmother suddenly started crying and was bemoaning about what happened to her family.  Since I have been teaching that kid for over 2 years, I became quite close to that family.  I asked her mother what happened.  She then told me, her niece was “Oishi”, who was addicted to Yaba and murdered her parents.  I saw how the whole family was shattered.  Seeing the news over and over again in the T.V and newspaper I got all frustrated and adamantly believed her Yaba addiction ruined the whole family.  It is from then, when I thought family carelessness is the main motivator to addiction.  Since all the news was showing how much freedom her parents gave her and she was getting so much money I thought they were not much careful towards these things.  Not only that, every now and then I see news about Yaba in the news.  This seems to be one of the biggest problems in our country now.  This made me think and hence I came up with the idea to do my research on Yaba.

Yaba is one of the most popularly used drugs in Bangladesh in the recent years.  It has got so many street  names as “BABA”, “PILL”, “GARI”, “GUTI”, “BORI”, “FERARI”, STUFF”, etc.  It is a vanilla- scented small pink pill that fiercely gained huge popularity among not only the youths in this country, but also many respected persons of the society.  The primary ingredient used in this drug is methamphetamine; which is the main reason for its rising power.

The focus of my research will be on the basis for which people get addicted to Yaba and if they desire to quit.  Especially from 2006, taking Yaba became fashionable for the well-offs in the country.  After 2011, the numbers of Yaba addicts started rising very fast.  There are people who destroyed their life and their families because if this addiction.  I would like to know if majority of the Yaba addicts want to quit and go back to their normal lifestyle.  I also have the curiosity to know what influences people to get addicted mostly; their friend circles or the angst of broken family or lack of proper family care.  I hope to find answers to such questions through my research work.

Literature Review

“During World War II, Nazi doctors involved in research for the military developed a new drug that contained a wickedly potent lethal brew of intoxicating chemicals” (Elements Behavioral health, n.d.).  The pills were made with highly addictive mixture of Caffeine and Methamphetamines to keep the soldiers more active in the field.  A diverse range of corrosive ingredients, such as cleaning fluid, cold medicine, salt and lithium from camera batteries are used for the production of Yaba.  It is not very difficult to produce this drug and a domestic production and distribution network can be easily set up (Elements Behavioral Health, n.d.).  Hodal (2013) stated that, according to a report in 2011, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, Philippines, Japan and South Korea are the countries were Yaba is most popular.  As the demand started rising, the amount of Methamphetamine used was increased from 20% to almost 95% to give it a more pure and crystalline form.  Bangladesh recently is in the upswing on the use of Yaba as it is now the target to the criminal syndicates of Burma.  Data from Bangladesh’s department of Narcotics Control represents that, in 2008 over 36,000 Yaba pills were seized by the police which raised to 2 million in 2012 (p. 18).