site.btaNew Illicit Drugs Cause Much More Health Damage, Experts Warn

New illicit drugs are much more damaging to physical and mental health than 'traditional' drugs, while gambling addicts are the ones most likely to kill themselves, Zhelyaz Turlakov of the Kosher center for rehabilitation and psychotherapy of addictions said on Monday at a BTA-hosted news conference. Attending the event, experts on addiction therapy shared the view that the state should create an addiction prevention mechanism, 1% of excise duties on alcohol and tobacco should be directed to prevention, and gambling advertisements should be discontinued.

Psychotherapist Plamen Dimitrov said that the reasons why young people reach for psychoactive substances are low self-esteem, group pressure, peer evaluation, psychological trauma, and curiosity.

Some 300,000 Bulgarians use or abuse psychoactive substances, and these figures do not include alcohol abusers, Turlakov noted, citing data from a US State Department report. In his words, a very large number of addicted people in Bulgaria are outside the health and social systems and, practically, there is no instrument through which these people can receive adequate treatment. In more than 50 schools in 15 cities across the country, when working with children over the age of 12, the experts find that nearly 80% of them have tried alcohol or marijuana, and nearly 30% have experimented with amphetamines, methamphetamines, and laughing gas, he added.

Clinical psychologist Simeon Parlapanov said that new drugs cause strong dependence within two to three weeks, and there is still no treatment for it. There have been strokes and heart attacks among 15-16-year-olds, he added. Laughing gas, which is not on the illicit drugs list, leads to serious health hazards, with lasting damage to the nervous system, he explained. The use of a new type of liquid based on synthetic marijuana is growing. It leads to even greater dependence and is being sold legally, Parlapanov stressed.

Playwright Yana Dobreva said that gambling addiction is the new pandemic. Finance Ministry data shows that bets in 2022 were worth more than BGN 2.3 billion and online betting has tripled in the past two years. Between January 2022 and November 2022, the State has generated some BGN 171 million in revenues from online gambling operators, she said. Dobreva warned that gambling advertising in prime-time television is not regulated.