Women become addicts by overdosing tranquillisers

KARACHI - Unawareness among women in using tranquillisers to cure diseases can lead them into addiction of the same and this trend is on the rise in City, The Nation learnt Saturday.
Spokeswoman of the New Horizon Care Centre (NHCC), an NGO, which provides free drugs treatment and rehabilitation to the drug addicts for the past several years, apprised the scribe of the phenomenon.
She said that NHCC provided an opportunity to the affected women to rehabilitate and in this regard the management of NHCC had established a women treatment and rehabilitation centre at Gulshan-e-Iqbal, 13-D-2, Waseem Bagh.
Farheen Siddiqui, who is also the in-charge of women centre, said that hundreds of women mostly belonging to the middle-class found involved in using tranquillisers.
She said the women in question had never had a history of being vulnerable to any addiction and they simply became become addicts as they got used to taking tranquillisers during the treatment of their ailments including pregnancy.
"When the centre was established dozens of cases came into the knowledge of the administration that several women are taking various types of tranquillisers as an addiction", she said.
Farheen said that these women were destroying their lives by regularly using tranquillisers through syringes and some of them had so much addicted that they used 4 to 5 syringes at a time.
The staffers and volunteers of NHCC disclosed that the wholesale market of medicines in Juria Bazar had virtually become a paradise for the women who used tranquillisers and they are the regular buyers.
In experts' opinion continuous use of any tranquillisers without any doctor's prescription is called drugs addiction.
A fellow who works in the wholesale market of Juria Bazar told this scribe that 50 to 100 women, most of them belonging to the middle class including working women would go there daily to purchase syringes of tranquillisers and pills.
He said that this practice had been continuing for the past many years and he himself was surprised that no body took notice of the wrongdoing which was perilous to the lives of women.