AMMAN (Middle East Eye) – At al-Rashid Hospital, a private rehabilitation facility on the outskirts of Jordan’s capital, Amman, the loudspeaker sounds, calling for nurses to attend to a newly-admitted patient.
A few minutes later, a flustered nurse rushes into the meeting room. “It’s the new patient,” the 29-year-old nurse, Alaa al-Mhawsh, says, noting that during a psychotic outbreak he had tried to escape the facility.
The patient, a 22-year-old Jordanian, has psychosis related to the abuse of multiple illicit drugs, including crystal meth and captagon, both highly addictive stimulants that are now widely available and commonly used in Jordan, Mhawsh tells MEE.
Over the past decade, Jordan has faced a worsening drug abuse problem - the kingdom caught at the nexus of a booming narcotics trade.
Official figures show that drug-related crimes rose from just 2,041 in 2005 to 20,055 in 2020. Drug offences are now the most common type of crime committed in Jordan, according to a recent study by Jordan’s justice ministry.
Mustafa al-Hiyari, a Jordanian colonel and director of military media, previously said that with drug trafficking on the rise, Jordan is becoming not just a transit route, but also a destination for the drugs, which “targets Jordanian society”.
In response, the Anti-Narcotics Department (AND) has intensified its efforts to crack down on drug trafficking and smuggling activities. In one of the raids last month, AND agents seized around 500kgs of hashish and two million pills. In the most recent drug raid on 8 September, agents arrested a suspected drug dealer in possession of 600,000 pills.
“My ward is nearly full,” says Mhawsh, who also treats patients from the Persian Gulf states.
She says that among her patients this year she has seen a rise in captagon and crystal meth use, as well as an increase in the abuse of prescription medications like Pregabalin and Lyrica, commonly used to treat pain and anxiety.
The nurse adds that the hardest part of her work is “when the patient becomes psychotic”, describing the terrifying hallucinations and delusions her patients have experienced - a result of the heavy use of powerful stimulants, such as captagon and crystal meth.
Mhawsh says that now, more drugs are available: “Five years ago, the kind of patient was different. The patients used one, or max, two drugs. Now, they’re trying three or four different drugs at once.”
Drug abuse is rampant among Jordan’s youth, with the immense economic and social pressures only providing a welcoming space for the increasingly accessible drugs.