Design Tech

Cheap, plentiful and devastating: The synthetic drug kush is walloping Sierra Leone

February 10, 20249:52 AM ET
Enlarge this image26-year-old Zainab Sankoh in a shack at the Kingtom dump site in Freetown, Sierra Leone. A self-described “hustler,” Sankoh used to send money home to support her family and her young daughter in a village in the south of the country. Now, she spends almost all her money on kush. “My life is miserable” said Sankoh. “This is not the Zainab I used to be.”

Tommy Trenchard for NPR

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Tommy Trenchard for NPR

26-year-old Zainab Sankoh in a shack at the Kingtom dump site in Freetown, Sierra Leone. A self-described “hustler,” Sankoh used to send money home to support her family and her young daughter in a village in the south of the country. Now, she spends almost all her money on kush. “My life is miserable” said Sankoh. “This is not the Zainab I used to be.”

Tommy Trenchard for NPR

It’s barely 9 a.m. but the cramped alleyways of Kaduna in the western end of Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, are already pack..

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