Retribution over rehabilitation

Drug use in Lebanon is said to be prevalent but remains difficult to define. An estimate from a 2012 report by the Institute of Health Management and Social Protection at Saint Joseph University in Beirut suggested that the “number of drug users in Lebanon ranges from 10000 to 15000 and that this figure is continuously increasing.” The leading drugs of choice are heroin, cannabis and cocaine, the report concluded, and statistics corroborate a high incidence of those drugs among arrested users. Looking at the statistics on user-related arrests gives a tip-of-the-iceberg snapshot of the problem but gaps in the data obscure its real size and challenges efforts to push progressive alternatives, like rehabilitating drug users instead of jailing them, forward. When arrested, anecdotes by drug users describe maltreatment during detainment at the hands of the Lebanese police. One such story was recounted by Sadecc Choucair who admits, in his self-published