Getting out the message to our youth: ‘Say no to drugs!’
Print Edition
AIZA Kashif, who hails from Pakistan, has a dream: eliminating drug abuse. Teaching science at a high school in Zhangjiang Town of the Pudong New Area, she serves as an “anti-drug ambassador” for the town and her efforts have received positive public feedback.
Kashif and her family have lived in China for five years and are grateful at the welcome they have received. Her fight against drugs is a way of saying thank-you to the local community.
“As an expat, I need to get some paperwork done regularly,” says Kashif. “One day when I was in the town service center, I saw a poster trying to recruit ‘ambassadors’ to help in anti-drug promotion. It occurred to me that I could do that.”
It was the last day of registration and Kashif had only four hours to complete and return the application form. It was in Chinese, so she grabbed a dictionary and sought help from her family.
“It asked me for my address, but I didn’t know how to write it in Chinese, so I went outside and asked the first person I saw to write it for me,” she recalls.
And, thus, Kashif became the first foreign anti-drug ambassador in Shanghai.
Shanghai has more than 80,000 officially registered drug abusers and more than 800 officials and 1,000 community social workers dedicated to anti-drug programs that include rehabilitation and education.
Social workers not only help abusers kick the habit but also assist in finding them jobs that will put their lives a new track. An estimated half of abusers have been “clean” for three years, and about 65 percent of former addicts are employed.
“I realized that many young people today hate textbook-style lectures, so we had to think of other ways to communicate with them,” she says.
Her idea: a mini-movie. The resulting video tells the story of a young punk girl who falls in the trap of drug abuse. It shows the pain she suffers as a result. The girl is portrayed on film by Huang Yiling, another anti-drug ambassador, while Kashif plays the role of her teacher.
The movie was first aired at a rock concert, where band members lent their support to the cause.
“The atmosphere at the concert was really positive,” says Kashif. “It was nothing like a boring classroom. I think our message got through. Rock is cool but drug abuse is not.”
Kashif graduated from the College of Pharmacy at the University of the Punjab, one of the best in Pakistan.
Before moving to China, she worked for several years in a pharmacy in the United States. She devoted her holidays there to do volunteer work in hospitals and other institutions. It was during that time that she first met so many young people whose lives had been ruined by drugs.
“Some of them were high school students from well-to-do families,” she says. “But their parents didn’t bring them up well. These young people all believed that they would not get addicted or that they could kick addiction as they had to. They were mistaken.”
Kashif says she appreciates that the Chinese government is very strict on drug use, cracking down on users no matter who they are or who they know. In the past two years, nearly a dozen celebrities, including actors, singers, scriptwriters and directors, were arrested on drug charges in China, shedding a public spotlight on the magnitude of the problem.
The tougher policy stance on drugs was one reason why Kashif decided to move from the US to China. She says she opposes legalization of marijuana, which is becoming a trend in many US states. California Proposition 64, while legalizing the cultivation of cannabis for recreational use, will “do more harm than good,” she says.
It’s a lie, she adds, that marijuana is not addictive and does no harm to the health of users. “Everything containing an opiate is addictive and harmful if abused,” she says. “Such substances are not for ‘recreation’.”
Kashif’s eldest son is 15 years old, and she wanted him to grow up in a relatively safe and foreigner-friendly environment. China offered both. Her two children, who are fluent in Mandarin, support her anti-drug efforts.
However, Kashif says she does wish the Chinese government would treat drug addict less as criminals and more like ordinary people who have just chosen the wrong path.
“Society will look down on them if they are treated like criminals and put in jail,” she says. “That’s not a good prescription for getting them clean and back into society.”
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