IN October, a member of the Reddit community r/meth, an online hub for methamphetamine enthusiasts, went viral for a series of posts purporting to be from an active duty soldier in the Sudanese civil war.
In one post, he talks about looting baggies of crystal from the lifeless corpses of fallen foes. In another post, he’s dropping notoriously inaccurate barrel bombs “filled with whatever will go boom” from an old, Soviet-era warplane.
"More than half" of Sudanese soldiers use meth, Adande said, "mostly to be able to stay up for four or five days straight and get more s**t done ... and as a way to do missions that you probably won't do sober."
Stimulants in warfare are nothing new, but now they're overheating Sudan's bloody internal conflict. A postwar addiction crisis is awaiting Sudan.
Read the full story here below.
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From Salon.com
Dated 20 December 2024 1:09PM (EST) - full copy:
Sudan’s gruesome civil war has a new driving force: the meth trade
Stimulants in warfare are nothing new, but now they're overheating Sudan's bloody internal conflict
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In October, a member of the Reddit community r/meth, an online hub for methamphetamine enthusiasts, went viral for a series of posts purporting to be from an active duty soldier in the Sudanese civil war. In one post, he talks about looting baggies of crystal from the lifeless corpses of fallen foes. In another post, he’s dropping notoriously inaccurate barrel bombs “filled with whatever will go boom” from an old, Soviet-era warplane.
This wasn’t the first time 31-year-old Adande had tried meth. After having largely grown up abroad, he’d already been busted for dealing the drug in Oman.
“I was taken from jail and deported and thrown directly in the middle of the war zone,” he told me. Stepping foot back in his homeland, where it was kill or be killed, Adande believed it was in his best interest to enlist.
Adande said he belongs to “a tribal militia called the United Front,” which is now supporting the Sudanese military in its campaign against the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a rebel military faction that broke with the government in 2023. He sent along a video of himself holding his ID as proof of his claims.
“I’m not in any specific division, I just happen to be related [to] the militia head, so I was trained a little and got to be a part of many aspects of the war,” he said. “I saw and still see ground action, aerial missions that are coordinated with the army, etc., but I am never on the frontlines as I mainly help with the technical/financial/logistics and anything else my education and experience allows … I do have a rank but it's kinda bulls**t and just based on the family/tribe thing and more honorary than anything. I was just lucky that even though I was never [living] here, just coming from the ‘right’ family is enough to get preferential treatment.”
Sudan, on the frontiers of Arab-dominated North Africa and sub-Saharan Black Africa, has long relied on using tribal militias to quash insurgencies. One such militia was the Janjaweed (sometimes translated as “devils on horseback”), which carried out a genocidal counterinsurgency in the Darfur region of western Sudan from 2003 to 2005, before evolving into the paramilitary RSF led by General Hemedti. After dictator Omar al-Bashir was toppled via a revolution in 2019, the RSF and official Sudan Armed Forces stepped in to “manage” the transition of power. Then, in a 2021 coup d’etat, the SAF cast aside whatever remained of civilian leadership altogether to rule alongside Hemedti’s RSF. But their uneasy power-sharing arrangement collapsed into open warfare by April last year.
The ethnic Arab RSF, backed by wealthy Middle Eastern monarchies such as the United Arab Emirates, has resumed its genocidal campaign against Black Sudanese, allegedly bursting into villages to gang-rape the women in front of their families and slaughter every male older than age 10. There have been reports of mass suicides among survivors. The death toll from the conflict may already be in the hundreds of thousands, although the true number is unknown, while over 14 million have been forced to abandon their homes.
Sudan is a major producer and exporter of cannabis (known locally as "bango"), and for centuries that was the drug of choice until approximately 2019 with the arrival of stimulants, particularly methamphetamine or crystal meth. The seemingly sudden surge of meth use sparked a panic in Sudanese society. The reigning junta declared a war on drugs, claiming that counter-coup protesters were high, while independent media reports the narco-business is facilitated by elements within the military, police and RSF.
Lubna Ali, head of the Bit Makli Organisation and director of the Gadreen Centre for Addiction Treatment, the only such institution in the country which is still functioning, told Salon that in her centre in Port Sudan, 90% of substance use disorders involve methamphetamine.
“Methamphetamine is not produced in Sudan — it only comes from overseas,” Ali said. “The drugs began spreading before the war and attracted the youth, because they have not had self-esteem for a long time. First of all the revolution, and after that corona[virus] comes and there is no school or work for two years. Then this war. Almost five years from when the youth are supposed to finish university, they are stuck in the second year or third year.”
Adande holding a bag of meth (Courtesy of Adande)
“They feel they don't have any future,” Ali continued. “Some of them cope with the stress with drugs. Some of them committ suicide. Some of them illegally emigrate to Europe, paying whatever they have, selling their family houses or do anything. Maybe they sell drugs in the streets to get money to be able to escape out of the country.”
Ali noted that meth use has exploded since the outbreak of war, particularly among militia members. As for drug use within his ranks, Adande says it's “very common.”
“More than half" the soldiers use it, he said, "mostly to be able to stay up for four or five days straight and get more s**t done, and yeah, recreationally too, and as a way to do missions that you probably won't do sober." Senior officers tend to "turn a blind eye if you can control yourself and do your part, and if you tweak and go crazy, you'll get killed in the next mission/raid/battle anyway, so that problem sorts itself out.” He said some officers are using meth as well, but not as many or as visibly as ordinary soldiers.
Drugs and war have been a common combination throughout history. Probably the best-known case study was World War II, where stimulants were used on all sides to keep their troops fighting on minimal sleep. But pretty much any major conflict in the last 2,000 years has featured drugs in some way. The term “Dutch courage” (to do something drunk you'd be too scared to do sober) originates from the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 17th century, where soldiers braced themselves with sips of jenever, a Dutch version of gin.
“The use of alcohol and other drugs during wartime is historically documented back as far as 333 B.C., with references to the use of opium poppy sap to relieve the suffering of war during Alexander the Great's invasion into Persia,” said Dessa K. Bergen-Cico, a professor of addiction studies at Syracuse University.
In the 1932-35 Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, parcels of coca leaves were airdropped to Bolivian soldiers. Chewing coca provides a mild, invigorating buzz, and if processed further the leaves can be used to extract cocaine. During the 1939-40 Winter War with the Soviet Union, Finnish troops dosed themselves with heroin in order to keep fighting through their runny noses and the fierce Nordic winter. The Finns consumed 25 times more heroin than anyone else in the world, at a time when that drug could be found in any pharmacy as pills or cough syrup. Finland was so fond of heroin that the nation resisted U.N. efforts to ban it all the way into the 1950s.
Long before insurgents in the Middle East began deliberately blowing themselves up, the Japanese used kamikaze pilots in World War II, perhaps the first suicide bombers. Filling their planes with explosives, the kamikazes’ aim was to crash headfirst into U.S. warships, causing maximum damage.
Methamphetamine was actually invented in 1893 by Japanese chemist Nagayoshi Nagai — before their final mission, the pilots were given large doses to fire them up in case the samurai credo of death before dishonor wasn’t enough.
The Nazis were especially mad for meth. Tank drivers and fighter pilots were fed meth-filled chocolate bars, and Berlin factories churned out 35 million “energy pills” for the 1940 invasion of France, which partly explains the rapid German advance — they were overamping (the technical term for “tweaking”) all the way to Paris. The Allies, meanwhile, swallowed pep pills known as Benzedrine: A hundred thousand pills were procured by Field Marshal Montgomery for the 1942 battle of El Alamein in Egypt. Only the Red Army didn’t dose its troops with speed, instead drowning them in vodka.
More recently, Captagon, a weaker speed-like stimulant, provided chemical courage to all sides during the Syrian civil war, numbing hunger, pain, fear and the need for sleep.
Substance abuse and addiction are closely correlated with trauma, and a population rattled by guns and grenades can take longer to find peace than negotiations themselves. After World War II, leftover meth stocks were peddled in occupied Tokyo by the yakuza, capitalizing on nationwide shock, defeat and humiliation. Could a postwar addiction crisis be awaiting Sudan?
“Yes, it most certainly will,” warned Bergen-Cico. “Drugs, including alcohol, are mechanisms of defense from one’s thoughts, emotions and physical pain. After decades of conflict, addiction rates among the population in Afghanistan are estimated at 10%. The Ukrainian Health Ministry and Ministry of Defense are actively preparing to meet the traumatic stress and addictions needs of its citizens, veterans and military — knowing that everyone has been affected to some extent.”
As for Adande, when we last spoke he was hiring a smuggler to drive him over the desert abroad. It turns out Sudanese intelligence officers intel are on Reddit as well, and were not too impressed with his viral meth-posting.
“They have a capture or kill order on me, I know that from three reliable sources,” he told me. “Simply because of my history, background and online activity, they think I’m paid by UAE or something and the level of noise my posts made means I am state-backed and not just an idiot over-sharing.”
For his part, Adande was pessimistic about his nation’s future or a resolution to war, saying “It’s just Sudan being Sudan.”
Read more about drugs, war and Sudan
- The other war from hell: Struggle and suffering in Sudan — while the world looks away
- Abandoning drug decriminalization is a mistake — the drugs were never the point
- Inside the sordid world of "Meth Tumblr"
By NIKO VOROBYOV. Niko Vorobyov is the author of the book "Dopeworld." Follow him on X @Narco_Polo420 MORE FROM NIKO VOROBYOV
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View original: https://www.salon.com/2024/12/20/sudans-gruesome-civil-has-a-new-driving-force-the-meth-trade/
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