Memoirs of a former drug and alcohol addict Drugs robbed me of my wealth

Peter Obenga, 32, a psycho educator and mentor spends his days travelling to different schools and rehabs, enlightening students on dangers of drug and alcohol addiction by telling his story.

He lets them read from his Living in Another Man’s Shadow, an autobiography that details the years he spent as an alcohol, marijuana and pethidine addict. 

His is quite a story; one of a remarkable turnaround.

It begins in his family where he learnt the art of sipping from the bottle, to hospital where pethidine became his next big addiction. He says his father was a staunch lover of alcohol and because of this, there was always alcohol at home. His father was later killed by the potent brew.

“The first time I tasted alcohol at a home party, I liked it because it gave me excitement. Many people knew me as a shy boy but I remember when I took it, I danced myself silly,” Obenga recollects.  

Alcohol became his companion all through his ‘O’ Level up to Makerere University where he pursued a bachelor’s degree in Development Studies.

While in ‘A’ level, Obenga often raided the chemistry laboratory to drink ethanol and once almost threw the school into crisis when there was no ethanol to be used in mock practical exams.

From ethanol, he started drinking ‘Kasese’ alias ‘kay’ – a local potent gin – which he and his friends tanked before hitting the bar. The essence was to get drunk first, as beers in the bar were too expensive for them.

While in his S.6 vacation, he scooped a government job paying more than Shs 300,000 a month, an amount he says was juicy for a school leaver. Oblivious of how to use or invest the money, he hit the bar.

Work to the bar became a trend and while at university, his room in Lumumba hall was always well-stocked with alcohol which he used to kill hangovers.

Owing to this lifestyle, Obenga dodged lectures and choked on retakes.

Experimenting with marijuana;

While in senior two, he succumbed to peer pressure and started smoking cigarettes in the toilets where teachers could not catch them. These friends, whom he now calls crazy, also turned him into a ganja boy by his S.4.

“One day I followed the clique and reached a place where they used to smoke from. Instead of pulling out cigars, they pulled out marijuana sticks. I did not want to feel left out, so I smoked it,” he said.

The first time he tried it, he became restless, walked the entire school for about eight hours and nursed a sore throat. Nonetheless, he began main-lining marijuana and eventually became addicted to it in addition to alcohol. After more than four years of being almost permanently high, he started suffering from tactile, auditory and visual hallucinations. His mind was at the brink of insanity.

Once, after finishing an exam, he and his friends went to the rooftop of a bar in Wandegeya (a popular hangout town for university students) where they smoked ganja in order to relax.

After this, he started to climb over the balcony because he was seeing a slope where he could walk instead of open air.

Luckily, his friends held him back and led him to his room. But even then, he tried to break free from their strong grip because he wanted to walk on his own. He started walking into the cars’ direction because it was where his high mind saw a free path.

Once at Lumumba hall, the hallucinations got worse.

“A friend of mine persuaded me to take a shower [to cool it off] and instead of seeing water coming out, I was seeing snakes so I did not shower. Since then, I have never smoked again,” Obenga said.

This was in his third year at university in 2003.

Operation to remember

Although he stopped smoking, alcohol was still reigning and because of it, he was diagnosed with multiple infections in his weak and sickly body. He needed an operation that sentenced him to a life free of alcohol, according to the doctor’s orders.

During the operation, he was shot with a pethidine dose, medicine used to relieve pain.

For him, the euphoria the drug produced in his body did not end on the operation table. It followed him three years later to his job.

Even his early efforts to stop boozing didn't last long, even though they eventually became mundane and unpleasurable. Obenga resorted to taking squadron, a 55 per cent alcohol potent drink to overcome the feeling of being ‘dry-drunk’. With less alcohol in his life, he tried finding solace in religion.

“I tried religion in 2004 after watching Watoto Church’s Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames. I started singing in the choir and I thought life was getting better,” he says.

Nevertheless, he ventured into car importation and real estate business and slowly began absconding church owing to his busy schedule. As he started to get more consignments, and work stress getting to his head, he resorted to hanging out at bars – not to drink, but to cool off stress.

Finding a ‘haven’

Sooner than later, he got reintroduced to pethidine as he had found someone who could get it for him on the black market, at Shs 50,000. Pethidine became his source of problem alleviation, so much so that, when he would get a stressing phone call from work, he would take a shot.

After three months of self-medication, one shot was not enough. Pethidine is supposed to take only 45 minutes in one’s system but his was taking less than 10 minutes because he wanted more euphoria.

Soon, he started purchasing it at Shs 30,000 because his suppliers doubled. By then, his work had started going down the drain.

“I would leave at 8am and by 10am, I was back home to get shots. I was not meeting my clients’ expectations and was using the drug as an escape haven,” he recalls.

Obenga says he knew there had to be more to life than getting high, but he felt powerless to give up the use of the drug. In 2008, he acknowledged he had a problem and this propelled him to go to a physician friend at Mulago hospital.  The physician detoxified him for three weeks but it was the most horrifying experience because he started shaking violently, became so paranoid and began to hallucinate again. He became a manic parody of himself.

He recounts: “I kept in my bed for over five days and could not turn to see what was happening around me. I was hearing voices and one of them was of the police. I started to hallucinate that police dogs were sniffing me out and I could not eat. I was hearing as if my friends were gossiping about me to the police and heard people banging my door.”

He dropped use of the drug for a week after he left hospital but he soon relapsed, hoping he could control it.

This time, he administered 10 shots, ran into debts and started getting loans from loan sharks with hope of restoring his business. However, he used the loans to buy pethidine. To sustain his addiction, he sold all his property and started sleeping on the floor of his rental. 

Finding and losing his new job

After leaving hospital, he had scooped another job but could not sustain it. Every after 30 minutes, Obenga would hide in the bathroom and inject himself, behaviour that angered his boss.

“One day I came to work and he told me I was fired, arguing that I was spending more time out than on his business,” he remembers.

He hustled for another job, this time in Kayunga district.

However, the prophetic adage of ‘old habits die hard’ came to pass because even then, Obenga would commute to Kampala daily to get pethidine shots. He gave up this job and returned to Kampala.

He also became paranoid of leaving home because of debts and hired the services of a boda boda man to bring the drug for him.

Depression sets in

With continuous use, he started to hate the drug, dealers and himself. He took an over dose of the drug and kept an intravenous cannula attached to his arm for a month; every vein in his body was pierced and collapsed.

Once, his sister came and found him crammed in a corner and immediately took him to hospital. Unknown to him, however, he was partly crippled.

“When the physician checked my body, he confirmed that there was a lot of infection in my body and warned me that if I did not stop what I was doing, I would die,” Obenga says.  

Turning point

With the death threat, he sought help from his family. He was taken to Serenity rehab in Bwebajja and it is here that he started to pen his book.  He completed it in 2011, the year he left rehab.

In 2012, he married the love of his life and together they have a daughter.

Today, Obega spends his time helping addicts find their own paths to sobriety and this has come at the price of constant vigilance, because addiction is irrational and stubborn.