In the blistering heat of Freetown, Sierra Leone, young men gather on street corners, their limbs swollen, eyes glazed. They are the victims of kush, a cheap and deadly synthetic drug sweeping the country.
But kush is not an isolated tragedy. From the townships of apartheid South Africa to the 21st-century streets of the UK, synthetic drugs have a long history of flourishing in places where society has abandoned its most vulnerable.
Kush first appeared in Sierra Leone around 2016, but its spread in recent years has been nothing short of catastrophic. Between 2020 and 2023, psychiatric admissions linked to the drug skyrocketed to a reported 1,865 cases at the country’s only psychiatric hospital.
