Greece Reality on Drugs

Young guy thinking.

In my early twenties, I believed that my country, Greece, had the biggest drug addiction problem in all of Europe. However, after I’d been in others countries, I realized that things are not so different and perhaps, in the end, Greece has a minimum level of the problem—but that does not make it any less important.

It is so easy to find drugs if you know where to go and you have the money. And in some cases, you don’t even need to have money at all! You can register as an addict at a hospital and after a while, you can have a government-stamped daily dose of “metha” or “subo’s”. Doctors (psychiatrists) can even prescribe for you every ten days up to five different kind of pills—up to two packages of each. And need I mention what is going on outside the hospitals regarding the black market and dealing the kind of pills which I mentioned above or other kinds of drugs such as weed, heroin, etc.?

The so-called “Crisis” has affected the drug market only at the point of “speed” drugs that are not so widespread as in the past years and many adults over thirty have found “help” and “solutions” to their anxiety and financial problems in psychiatric pills.

Dealers on the other hand, in order to keep their “customers”, have kept the same prices or even lowered them for drug dealing—and I am not talking about pills right now. Even though drugs like acid, ecstasy, etc. take more effort to find than before, teenagers and older people still take them when they attend organized open or private parties. Heroin, cocaine and weed (xasis and marihuana) on the other are another story. You can’t get good “quality” with those drugs if you can’t pay enough and the result is that the percentage of drug addicts getting an overdose or delirium from a fix becomes even greater. Because most of the addicts can’t pay enough, dealers lower the quality with chemical mixes that give almost the same effects as heroin, cocaine and weed and in this way they keep the drug users alive and addicted long enough to be able to keep then satisfied and a regular customer.

Greece dark street.

You only have to take a walk by my city’s university (which I don’t recommend anyone does during the night) and you will have a taste of what I am talking about.

The war in Syria was a very sad event and not a fair experience for the natives. I understand their decision and their pain and why some of them migrated to Europe, Greeks opened their arms to them even though we already had a financial “crisis” on our back to handle. Unfortunately, along with these people, many others arrived here from various Asian countries. I don’t have anything against those countries (which is why I don’t name them) but unfortunately, with the good came some who have helped to take criminality to the next level in my country and have contributed greatly to drug black market.

Along with this some big cities in Greece now have new ghettos which are most of the time, as I believe we all know, centers for drug dealing, gun dealing and prostitution.

In order to give you a better picture and how the problem is “handled” by authorities, I will keep it as simple this: If you observe, you will quickly figure out which streets police are patrolling and at which hours of the day and if you avoid that, you will never get arrested.

In twenty-one years (seventeen of them on heroin, three of them in cocaine) I was stopped and searched for drugs seven times. Only twice did the police manage to find a small quantity of drugs on me which was just enough to take me to the police station and have me pass the night there. Police for some reason mostly go after the drug addict while perhaps once a year a dealer gets caught… and yet one wonders what the reasons are that this story is a never-ending one!

There are people in society trying to do their best to handle this problem. Parents are checking their children, informing them, testing them and checking if their children’s friends are good kids. At school, many teachers work to try to keep all their students safe. However, when a kid or a teenager or an adult becomes a drug addict exhibiting antisocial behavior, society turns its back on such people and their family as well.

That same society then demands that the addict’s family deal with and solve the problem and the solutions that families adopt are either to neglect their drug-addicted family member and leave them alone to somehow handle their drug addiction (fortunately this is in rare cases), or the family tries to help this person to withdraw from drugs. Unfortunately, at that point, many private companies take advantage of such families by taking a lot of money for withdrawal and so-called “rehabilitation” of the addict while in the end delivering not even half of what they say that they can offer or accomplish in terms of results.

Oftentimes, the family will then push their member to register at a hospital as a government-sanctioned drug addict but what these families don’t realize is that they are sending their loved one even further into drug abuse!

In reality, I described a problem that is not just in my country but is the same everywhere. The type of drugs may be different as are the names of the places, ethnic backgrounds and languages, but alcoholism, drug abuse and addiction are a common enemy that knows no ethnic boundaries or social status. Because of alcoholism and drug abuse, people are dying, lives are being ruined, futures are never met and families are being damaged beyond repair.

E.G. —Narconon Staff Member

AUTHOR

Elvis

Elvis has been helping people since early stages of his life. His devotion to helping led him to join staff at a Narconon drug rehabilitation center to help people recover from their addictions to drug or alcohol.

NARCONON EUROPE

DRUG EDUCATION AND REHABILITATION