Pandemic pressures fuel alcohol, drug abuse

More people are turning to alcohol and drugs to cope with the onslaught of the coronavirus, but with the pandemic decimating most face-to-face interactions, it may not be long in coming before local researchers know just how hard Jamaicans are sipping and lighting up in the name of COVID-19.

An online study released by United States market research and analytics firm The Harris Poll, and Commissioned by Alkermes, an Ireland-based bio-pharmaceutical company, charged that nearly one in five Americans is consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol over the past 18 months of COVID-19.

Six thousand adults from the US participated in that Internet survey between March 30 and April 7, and of them, 1,003 reported heavy drinking – defined as having had two drinking days in a single week – at least twice in the previous 30 days.

A heavy drinking day, according to the probe, was four or more drinks containing alcohol for women, and five or more drinks containing alcohol for men.

Last week, bartenders in Kingston and St Catherine laughed at those definitions of “heavy drinking”, theorising that Jamaicans are consuming far more alcohol than that weekly via popular ‘rum specials’ – a mixture of white rum containing 63 per cent alcohol and Boom energy drink or Ting soda – alone.

Research analyst at the National Council for Drug Abuse (NCDA), Uki Atkinson, leaned in favour of those arguments but stopped short last week, noting that empirical studies linking substance abuse and COVID-19 have been greatly hindered by the pandemic.

However, she cited drastic increases in calls to the NCDA and an online survey it conducted as indications of a growing drinking and drug problem in the country.

“There is not a lot going on for studies at the moment. It would be problematic to organise a national survey within this time when we are not interacting with people face to face. So we are not currently doing any face-to-face surveys,” Atkinson told The Sunday Gleaner.

“Our community and school-based interventions have been significantly impacted because we are not gathering people. Prior to this third wave, we went out and did needs assessment for school-aged children, looking at their mental health, but we had to pull our officers out of communities because we can’t risk their health,” explained Atkinson, which forced them to try to gather data via the Internet.

“But once you go online with a survey, it limits the representativeness of it because some people are just not engaging with it,” she cautioned of the Internet probe which canvassed only 800 people late last year. “This survey at best gives us an indication that some people are having serious problems.”

STEEP INCREASE IN CALLS

More telling is the 361 calls to the council’s helpline during the first six months of the pandemic, which is far more than any other year since 2013, she said. Significantly more males called the helpline than females, and most are in the 18-29 age group.

Forty-three per cent of people who called for help were doing so on behalf of their relatives and friends, while three per cent of callers received drug intervention previously.

Additionally, researchers believe the increase in call volumes may be due partly to an increase in public education by the NCDA during the early months of the pandemic.

“It is an exponential increase when you look at the six months for 2020 and this is definitely an indication of increased use. But we don’t want to be sensational, so we must also note that we have been doing public education to get people to call in. So it might be that more people are aware of how they get help,” noted Atkinson.

Cannabis was the main drug being abused among 64 per cent of the callers, while tobacco and alcohol accounted for 46 and 33 per cent, respectively, of respondents during the early months of the pandemic.

Of the online survey conducted by NCDA in the second half of last year, however, 88 per cent of respondents said they were clinging to alcohol as a coping mechanism through the pandemic, 48 per cent were using ganja, 34 per cent were hooked on cigarettes and 16 per cent were clinging to crack/cocaine.

MAIN CAUSES

Anxiety, social isolation, money problems and loneliness were identified as the main reasons for substance abuse among the respondents who were mostly urban residents between the ages of 18 and 39. Seventy-eight per cent of respondents of the online survey were females, many educated at the tertiary level.

Though insightful, such studies, Atkinson stressed, do not give an accurate picture of the situation, and thus islandwide generalisations cannot be made from them. In the meantime, she said, NCDA continues to carry out its regular functions.

“We are doing virtual and telephone counselling, we are still doing our drug treatment course, which is the alternative to incarceration where, when people are caught with minor offences, instead of going to jail, they go through our drug programme,” said Atkinson.

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com