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Child Refugees In Sweden With No Family Can’t Stop Using Heroin

REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic.

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Jonah Bennett Contributor
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There’s an epidemic of unaccompanied child refugees from Afghanistan using heroin once they arrive in Sweden.

Dr. Mathias Sjöberg, top doctor at Maria Ungdom, an addiction treatment center in Stockholm, said these child refugees seem to jump straight to the hardest drugs they can get their hands on, The Local Sweden reports.

“They aren’t taking the classic Swedish path of drug abuse where you start by smoking cannabis and then gradually move on through to the heavier drugs,” Sjöberg told TT newswire. “Instead they seem to jump all the steps and start at once with severe drug abuse, most often with brown rock heroin.”

The number of refugees being treated for addiction started rising rapidly in 2015, and that figure continued to escalate in 2016.

Since there is now such an established use of heroin, a strong drug trade is emerging in the Stockholm suburbs, particularly Rinkeby.

“After the summer of 2016, we began to see indications that a heroin market had started to be established there,” said Christoffer Bohman, head of the police in Järva, which is located in the northern part of Stockholm. “The reports came from the residents, the municipality and from those monitoring the underground.”

In early 2016, police started cracking down on the heroin trade, in one week arresting a dozen people involved, which was more than all of the arrests for that offense in 2015. Police then said that many of the child refugees developed their addiction in Greece and continued indulging the habit once they arrived in Sweden.

Drug dealers, police explained, start by enticing refugees with free samples. And once the refugees get hooked, as one former addict explained, they’ll kill to get more of the drug.

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