Does Turkey Need A Drug Class?

by: Mike Miller
1/28/2018

Just how bad is Turkey’s drug problem? Of course you realize I am not merely “talking turkey” I am referring to the Eurasian country known as The People’s Republic of Turkey, right?

How many people do you think perish each year in Turkey due to drug addiction? Before you answer, know that there are approximately 69 million Turkish people and more than 25% are age 14 and under. As reported in news.xinhuanet.com.

Last year 365 people died last year in Turkey due to drug addiction and 95.2 percent of the victims were male.

At least 105 of the deaths were directly connected to drug addiction like overdoses, and the other 260 fatalities were indirectly caused by drug usage. Do these numbers seem high, or low? To me they seem low. Either Turkey is fabricating the extent of its drug problem, or more likely, the heavy Muslim religious influence means there is much less drug use.

The average age of male drug addicts is 33.5, while the average age of their female counterparts is 43. There was one child under the age of 15 died due to drugs.

The Turkish security forces detained 105,665 suspects in 2011 in 67,099 drug raids. Among the drugs used in Turkey the usage of heroin and marijuana decreased, but the usage of cocaine, ecstasy and methamphetamine rose.

The government reported that in 2011 and 2012, 117 tons of cocaine, 17.1 tons of heroin, 1 million pills of captagon and 3 million ecstasy pills were seized by the Turkish security forces.

As a counselor for both in-class and online drug classes these types of reports are very interesting to me. I wonder if they have drug classes. How about online drug classes?