The story of Kweku Gardiner - an addict who ‘lived’ on drugs for 19 years

“I was at home taking my last straw of drugs when they came and arrested me”, he said, recounting the last bit of drugs and indeed the last time he took in drugs before his arrest and imprisonment.

Kweku Gardiner, who lived practically nineteen years of his life on cocaine and heroin, tells his story of how his smartness and intellect translated not only in his work as a system administrator (IT technician) but into devising meticulous ways of generating money to buy hard drugs.

Having gone through life with a single mother, Kweku who was intellectually gifted, in an effort to get through his difficult teenage years, got involved with peers who unfortunately were already in the “cocaine, heroin business” during his secondary school days.

He managed to escape failure at the university and successfully emerged as a graduate. Along the line, he got married and became a father of two girls.

An addict at this point, Kweku succeeded in using the drugs in the comfort of his ‘washroom” in his marital home with his wife clueless. He eventually introduced his 2-year-old daughter who, naïve as she was, wanted to follow her father everywhere and would knock on the door several times while he was in there.

He moved his dealings outside the house after he discovered his daughter on one such occasion, had taken one of the foils containing cocaine and hidden it in her panty; her reason “mummy wanted to throw it away and so she was trying to keep it for him”.

He recounted days when he, in order to generate money to satisfy his crave for more drugs which his salary obviously was not meeting, would “cook up” stories for his unsuspecting wife just so he could sell out his car, television and some gadgets at home. He even went the extra mile to forge documents to sell out his family house bequeathed to himself and his siblings by his late father, went into armed robbery and eventually decided to major in fraud as that appeared much easier and faster.

His battle with withdrawing from an addiction that had taken a huge part of his life was a starting point for his change. It took prison for a highly addicted Kweku Gardiner to recover from his addiction.

Fraud is not a resort or a relief in poverty…….keep an eye on your children, crime doesn’t pay, drug addiction is a chain you will find very hard to change, these were his final words to the youth who may have unfortunately found themselves in a similar situation and parents who might for one reason or the other may have been “too lenient” on their children.

The full story unfolds in this interview below;