South Africans Smoking HIV-drugs To Get High - BBC

Anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV/Aids are being bought and smoked by teenagers in South Africa to get high.
Reports suggest that the drugs are being sold by patients and even healthcare staff for money.
Schoolchildren have been spotted smoking the drugs, which are ground into powder and sometimes mixed with painkillers or marijuana.
Aids patients themselves have been found smoking the drugs instead of taking them as prescribed.
Anti-retrovirals are used to boost the immune system of people with HIV and to suppress the virus in the blood.
"I couldn't believe it. I was shocked at first, these were school boys in their school uniforms," documentary-maker Tooli Nhlapo told the BBC World Service's Outlook programme.
"They take a pill and grind it, until it is a powder. Some also mix it with painkillers and others mix it with marijuana," said Ms Nhlapo. "They showed me how they roll it and smoke it."
...[T]he South African Broadcasting Corporation documentary-maker ... was told to wait until school finished, so she could actually see how young some of the users were.
"I thought I was going to go to a tavern and see older drug addicts doing this, but I was shocked when I saw school children," she said.
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Smoking the pills has a hallucinogenic and relaxing effect.
"When I asked them why they like doing it, they said it helps them relax and forget about their problems," said Ms Nhlapo.
"When you look at them, just a few seconds after taking it, they are in another world," she added.
The children do not know where they are and they stop making sense.
The young users that Ms Nhlapo spoke with get access to these drugs from HIV patients or healthcare workers.
They know when the individual patients go to collect the drugs and buy them, or if they do not have any money, they steal them.
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When Ms Nhlapo first came across this new drug phenomenon, she thought it was just happening in one area, among a small group of people.
"I went back to the township and then I discovered that it was something that was known in the entire township," she said.
It has now become a national problem in South Africa, she added.
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