Les Mamelles (Seychelles) (AFP)

Sliding his fingers over the stigma of his past addiction, in the fold of his left elbow, Graham Mustache stirs up dark memories. "Heroin destroys you. You wake up in the morning, you feel bad in your body. Your only horizon is your next dose."

In the Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, 5% of the approximately 95,000 inhabitants are heroin addicts, or nearly 10% of the active population. A sad world record, according to the authorities of this archipelago more renowned internationally for its magnificent beaches and luxury tourism than for its drug problems.

In comparison, globally, 0.4% of the population was an opiate user in 2016, more than half of whom were Asians, according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. With Seychelles in the leading pack alongside producer countries like Afghanistan, according to national data gathered by the UN.

Graham Mustache, 29, started heroin as a teenager. "A difficult father," he whispers. "I have four brothers and two sisters, we were all heroin addicts at one time."

This morning when AFP journalists meet him, he is waiting, far from chic hotels and yachts, on a vacant lot in Les Mamelles, a locality in Mahe, the largest island in Seychelles, for the hour of methadone distribution, heroin replacement drug.

"I have been clean for over a year. I have found a job as a fisherman and I can see my two children, seven year old twins," said the young man, gray cap on his head, beaming with pride. .

Right on time, the white mini-van is parked. With the handbrake barely drawn, a line of a few dozen heroin addicts has already formed in front of its windows, waiting with a goblet for their daily dose of methadone, as part of a government program.

An old man leaning on a cane ingests 50 milliliters of this liquid, a skinny young woman with dark eyes joined the line with her baby in her arms, a taxi driver with hair carefully pulled back squeezes a few hands, smiling.

Injected or inhaled, heroin does not discriminate in Seychelles. It transcends social classes and generations.

- On the routes of heroin -

Archipelago with porous borders, Seychelles was hit hard by this drug at the end of the 2010s, when the new routes of heroin passing through East Africa emerged, crossing a population with purchasing power high compared to many African countries (average salary of 390 euros).

In this regard, many observers do not fail to pinpoint the paradox of Seychelles: it is the only African country considered to be "high income" by the World Bank, in particular thanks to a tourism sector in constant increase, but of which approximately 40% of the population lives below the poverty line according to 2015 figures.

"The problem has grown in magnitude because we reacted too late," said Patrick Herminie, director of the Agency for the Prevention of Drug Abuse and Rehabilitation (APDAR).

"In 2011, we realized that 1,200 people were using heroin and we took a punitive approach," says Herminie. "We have confused the traffickers with their victims."

In 2017, a report shows that the number of heroin addicts has increased to 5,000. The authorities then change their rifle. Heroin addiction is declared a public health priority and treated as a disease. A free methadone distribution program coupled with medical monitoring has been launched.

The state budget devoted to drug addiction reaches 75 million Seychellois rupees (5 million euros) for 2020, almost 10 times the 2016 budget. At APDAR, created in 2017, 75 people are mobilized, four times more than before.

"Drugs are no longer a taboo," notes Noéllie Gonthier, of the Seychellois NGO CARE which fights against drug addiction.

All the more important since it does not only concern heroin. "We have a problem with addictions in this country, alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana," says Herminie. "Right now, it's heroin, but at another time, it may be something else."

The phenomenon has become so commonplace that in schools, "sometimes children of four or five years old mimic the injection of heroin in the arm, to play", deplores Ms. Gonthier. "Our challenge is to make them understand that what they consider normal, because of their family background, is not normal at all."

- Taboo -

In Mahe, a small mountainous island with lush vegetation where the majority of the population lives near the water, life is peaceful, clean, without traffic jams or a lot of waste. Even poverty is hardly seen, concentrated in the popular suburbs with the worn walls of the capital Victoria or on the heights.

Why do so many Seychellois take drugs there? The authorities admit that they have not completed their reflections and research on the question, even if these revolve mainly around poverty which, in this archipelago, does not make it possible to live well but to buy doses.

In the meantime, some 2,500 heroin addicts are now participating in APDAR's "methadone program" and the results of the paradigm shift are not long in coming.

All indicators related to heroin use have improved: crime has fallen by 45%, the annual number of hepatitis C cases by 60% and unemployment among young people has dropped from 6.5 to 2.1 %.

In the streets of the capital, which resembles a small provincial town as elsewhere, billboards and wall frescoes on school buildings remind us that you should not take drugs.

But in Les Mamelles, addiction remains an everyday battle for some. The more so as to compete with the free methadone the dealers lowered the price of the dose of heroin.

The pale complexion, the glassy eye, the shortness of breath and drops of sweat beading on his forehead, Gisèle Moumou, 32 years old, suffers.

"Methadone helps me a lot but it is difficult not to touch heroin at all", assures the young woman, a consumer since the age of 13, when without her knowledge a friend " caught at a party "in a cigarette.

"Sometimes I crack," she says.

Cigarette in the corner of the mouth, a taxi driver deciphers: "Methadone is not bad, it removes the lack, but it does not give you the same sensations". "Sometimes I take it back. We are a small island in the middle of the ocean, what else can we do here?"

© 2020 AFP