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We seldom look askance at children who spin themselves round and round until completely dizzy they stagger round the room often collapsing in a ragged heap looking to all intents and purposes no different than their older relatives who behave the same way except that in the elder’s case they have probably taken some mood altering substance.

This apparently innocent pastime by children amply demonstrates mans age-old quest to alter his state and this has mostly been done through various substances from time immemorial. Alcohol and other mood-altering drugs from plants have served as a good source and today even synthetic drugs engineered in laboratories are available to not only give a "high" but to give a faster and stronger experience.

However when we think of drugs or drug abuse we usually think in terms of heroin, cocaine marijuana and other illicit drugs. We never ever think of alcohol or tobacco as drugs containing certain mood-altering components.

Definitely one area we never look at are inhalants and that is why we seem to be completely insulated against any feeling of outrage at the sight of thousands of children in the streets of Nairobi and other towns countrywide with little containers of glue stuck under their noses. Drug abuse blatantly and openly carried on under our noses yet the immoral stench of this serves only to blind us to the need for action.

It blinds us to the fact that though these are the so called untouchables, the kids and young adults everybody wants to pretend do not exist, there are other children in the comfort of their homes who are also huffing (sniffing inhalants) from the dozens of ordinary, innocent looking household products that we keep in our houses for everyday use. Numerous studies have been able to very minutely pinpoint the dangers of inhalants yet in Kenya this information is not so readily available.

So what exactly are inhalants? Simply put they are chemical products which are misused in order to achieve certain physical effects. Most of them are found in common household products and share one aspect which is central to their misuse; they give off fumes.

Some though like petrol are not ordinary household goods and I remember my one and only attempt at inhaling from a petrol soaked rag when I was a child a sobering introduction to what was called mangata and it is a ‘game’ I have over the years still seen children do while adults look upon it benignly with only slight admonition or reprimand.

I recently talked to a lady who likes sniffing from white-out the white coloured liquid stuff used to cover typing or printing errors so that one may write the corrections on top. She could not give me an exact reason why she did this except that she liked it.

What she is probably unaware of however is that she is using an inhalant and even were she aware she would probably not be unduly alarmed as people are generally not aware of the dangers of inhalants and think that using them is harmless. The truth of the matter is that inhalants are poisons and when breathed in not only damage the body, but the mind too.

These substances are so dangerous that using inhalants even once can cause death! Using inhalants can change forever the way one lives for it can impair the user disabling them and thereby altering the quality of the rest of their lives for the worse.

Inhalants slow down the body’s reactions and cloud thinking. Upon inhalation, they pass through the lungs and quickly pass into the bloodstream with chemicals getting to the brain in seconds. However the effects only last or a few minutes and often when they wear off leave the user depressed or even irritable.

Other effects of inhalant use include physical changes such as double vision, loss of coordination, weakness, severe headaches, nausea or vomiting, numbness and an irregular heartbeat. Yet the real danger with inhalants is the unpredictability of the consequences of use. For death can occur after many uses or after the first attempt.

Death might come in the form of suffocation as the inhalants make the body slow down so much so that the lungs stop working altogether. Spray inhalants can also coat the lungs preventing the oxygen from getting through leading to suffocation in this way.

Irregular heartbeat caused by inhalants occurs and the heart can actually stop beating altogether leading to death. But it is when mixed with other drugs that inhalants become even more dangerous for the combined effects of these drugs can lead to coma or death.

Like other mood-altering drugs such as alcohol, inhalants often affect the user’s judgment and coordination leading them to minimize danger and thus take foolish chances or risks they would not have ordinarily taken.

Note that the risks from inhalants do not end there for they can harm you in still other ways. For as you use them they reduce the flow of oxygen to the brain in the process damaging memory and impeding learning skills. This damage is permanent and once done cannot be undone.

Prolonged use as we see in the street children and people in the streets and informal settlements of our towns will in many cases end up with their livers and kidneys shutting down. When this occurs their bodies are no longer able to perform their key functions of ridding the bodies of toxins and this then necessitates getting transplants or regular, very expensive dialysis where a machine takes over these functions. Failure to access these two options, and the person dies. As it is a very expensive procedure either way which often sees families banding together and doing harambee’s to raise this cash who would fundraise for street people who can barely get enough to eat? This means they would be receiving a death sentence.

Bone marrow is also a target when one uses inhalants which can lead to its inability to produce enough red blood cells, causing the user feeling constantly tired. But they also weaken the body’s immune system inhibiting its defense against illness as well as eye diseases.

Inhalants cause loss of appetite too and this is probably one of the main reasons that street people use it. Yet every day we pass dozens of them with the inevitable glue bottle stuck under their noses and we do not raise a finger. The government makes a lot of noise from time to time about what intends to do yet the numbers of these glue sniffer’s seem to be increasing.

As citizens we need to help these children who may be saved from the streets tomorrow, but left in such an impaired state as to be almost vegetables living a quality of life that is poor and expensive to maintain.

We need to agitate and lobby the manufacturers to add components to the glue which produce violently adverse effects on anybody who would then attempt to inhale them. This should serve as a deterrent to even the most avid user. Granted there are other socio-economic reasons which have lead to this huge street population. But there are people and groups grappling with those. Let us as drug abuse campaigners help them by getting these young men and women off inhalants so that when salvation comes from the other groups their body’s and minds are still intact. Otherwise we are watching chemical cleansing of a whole segment of Kenyans and doing nothing. That makes us part of the execution squad.

David Ogot is a recovering alcoholic and the founder of the goinghomedotcom Trust a media NGO specializing in drug abuse awareness. He can be reached at goinghomedotcom@yahoo.com or website: www.goinghomekenya.org

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