Using Technology To Fight Drug Abuse

“There are many ways of skinning a cat”, so goes the popular saying. And with the advancement in technology innovations, the way we do things has changed dramatically, with information being passed on to the recipient at the click of a mouse. Using social networking applications such as Facebook and MXit, a group of former drug users and gangsters in South Africa are sharing their experiences and encouraging each other in their journeys towards wellness.

Mr Marlon Parker, an IT lecturer at South Africa’s Cape Peninsula University of Technology has started a drug counselling service using the cell phone chat service known as Mxit and the Facebook social networking application. “The main objective was to meet the youth on a platform that they are comfortable with as a first point of contact, where they can express themselves and receive counseling or advice on the issue of drug and substance abuse”, Parker states.

For the last two years, Parker, 30, who is also a PhD student at the university has been using the technology to with youngsters involved in drugs and gangs. Parker’s PhD thesis is on the use of technology to facilitate community change. During his research, he discovered that cell phones were the most commonly used piece of technology in all communities. The MXit cell phone chat technology has managed to rope in 8.6 million users around the country within a period of two years.
MXit is a free instant messaging program for mobile phones and PCs. It enables the user to send and receive text messages to and from mobile phones and PCs via the Internet using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) or 3G, rather than by using standard SMS technology.

Under the auspices of the Impact Direct Ministries—a community project, Parker and his team of six counsellors at the Impact Centre in Bridgetown approached a school about having a counselling service on MXit for trial purposes. The counsellors chat on MXit to addicts via the Impact Centre's computers, and have chat sessions between 3pm and 5pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Parker said they were hoping to run the service for as many hours in the day as possible once they had their own infrastructure. At any given time during the two-hour session they have about 50 contacts online.

The project was born following an increase in gang and drug activity on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape Province , which was causing tension within communities. According to Parker, these activities have a negative impact on citizens in these communities and contribute to a sense of helplessness. Reconstruction or rehabilitation of ex-drug addicts and ex-gangsters are challenging due to communities with tension not being able to empower these citizens or not willing to be rehabilitated. This presented the opportunity for the use of technology as part of the reconstructing of these citizens. Parker found himself starting this project after his elder brother, now serving a prison term, became a drug addict and pusher. “I had to do something since my mother was heartbroken as a result of my brother’s activities”, Parker confides.

The project was also inspired by a research conducted in 2007 which found that there is an increase in mobile instant messaging (MIM) amongst teenagers in South Africa , many of whom are using MXit, a popular South African (MIM), as their primary tool for messaging. Parker and his team interviewed members of the community and used their findings to formulate ideas on how people living in communities affected by drugs and gangsterism can be empowered and healed through web technologies.

“Collaborating with a local NGO, Impact Direct Ministries (IDM), we started a project to provide a platform on MXit to offer counselling, advice, frequently asked questions for people impacted by drug and substance abuse”, Parker says, adding: “We decided to equip ex-drug addicts with counselling, Internet and MXit skills and under the supervision of Cape Peninsula University of Technology and IDM these reconstructed ex-drug addicts were in a position to communicate with the contacts on MXit giving them real answers from their own personal life experiences. To access this service the user has to add our contact to their MXit profile”.

According to Parker, the service was initially tested with 20 learners in a local school. “After a few weeks of testing and demand from local schools we decided to roll it out to various schools in the community. After a month of running this project we’ve had more than a hundred subscribers to our contact on MXit and hundreds of conversations with this contact”, Parker says. “We are now in the process of rolling it out to interested high schools in the Western Cape and hope to expand this service to other provinces across South Africa”, he adds.

After chatting online, Parker and his team invite addicts to the centre for one-on-one counselling sessions. Addicts in other areas are referred to more local counselling services. Parker is amazed at the ability of the reconstructed drug addicts to use computers. “Only six months ago, most of them were computer illiterate but are now capable of sharing ideas using blogposts and videos”, Parker says, reiterating that this project can be replicated in any country, given its success.

Mr Brent Williams, 30, a reconstructed drug addict and pusher is full of praise for the Impact Project. “I started smoking tik (methamphetamine) at the age of 21 and only stopped last year. I was one of the first tik dealers in Bridgetown . I started drinking when I was 13 and by 21, I was taking tik, Ecstasy, cocaine, heroin and that's when things went wrong. I used to hang out with the gangsters but never became part of them because I knew they wanted to have control of me," Williams said during a moving presentation at the recently concluded Digital Citizen Indaba, part of Highway Africa Conference.

Williams said it was his mother who asked him to go to the Impact Centre for help last year. Now fully reconstructed, he helps people as young as 10 and others in their 50s. “It wasn’t easy to break away from friends. But I had to do it for my own good even as the withdrawal symptoms became unbearable”, Williams told this writer on the sidelines of the conference.

Williams and his team now visit schools and worksites and even drug dens where they offer counseling services. “I find it easy to approach the drug addicts and dealers since they recognize me as one of their former colleagues”, Williams says with a light touch.

Besides helping addicts with technology, Parker is also teaching his team members and clients how to use technology.

Parker and his team have a Facebook group called Impact where they add friends and engage with people about what they do and monitor addicts' lives closely.

On Facebook they have access to status updates on someone's profile. On the blog, www.reconstructed.org. ex-addicts share their experiences.