Liberia: They Survived Addiction. Now Comes the Hardest Part: Going Home - FrontPageAfrica

Summary:

• Liberia’s only government-approved rehab center has graduated more than 100 people, but many returning addicts say the true struggle begins after treatment, as they re-enter communities shaped by fear, stigma and memories of their past.
• Relapse remains a constant threat, with graduates describing isolation, lack of housing, and shattered family ties as major triggers.
• Officials admit reintegration is the weakest link in Liberia’s expanding anti-drug strategy, with beneficiaries often leaving rehab to unemployment, unstable homes, and limited support—raising questions over whether recovery can be sustained beyond detox.

By Nemenlah Cyrus Harmon with New Narratives

GERMAN CAMP, Grand Bassa – It’s graduation day here at Mother of Light, an off-shoot of a Lebanon-based anti-addiction program – the only government sanctioned facility so far to rehabilitate the growing number of people addicted to drugs in Liberia. Two patients, who have completed between nine and twelve months of residential treatment, are set to be formally integrated into society.

One of them, a young woman named Princess, stands in a loose circle of her peers and counselors, her voice steady but her eyes restless. (FrontPage/New Narratives is withholding last names to protect against stigma). The 30-year-old left here clean once before. But then, she says, she walked straight into the same loneliness that drove her into drugs.

“When I came here, they reintegrated us,” she says. “But I did not have anyone to go to.” Princess is determined this time will be different.

Princess’s experience reflects the long, difficult journey undertaken by most people recovering from drug addiction. As many as 60 percent of people treated for addiction will relapse at least once, according to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. Experts say for many of those recovering in Liberia the real battleground begins the moment they step back into neighborhoods still haunted by poverty and what addiction once made them do.

For Princess, emptiness was her trigger to start using again. After graduation, a reintegration package gave her money to start over. But like many in recovery, her family life was shredded. She had fled extreme poverty in Sinoe county in southeastern region at age 16. She ended up on the streets of Monrovia turning to prostitution to survive and falling into drug abuse. She has no idea where her relatives are.

Princess gave birth to four children during her addiction. Three were taken away by people she doesn’t know.

“I felt miserable and I felt rejected by my very self” she says of her addiction.

When she left rehab, needing a familiar connection, she returned to old friends and began using.

“Money is my trigger,” she says. “When they gave me the money, I was bragging, boasting, to show myself to my friends.”  

A 2022 UN-backed report found about one in five Liberian youth use narcotics, often synthetic blends such as “kush,” while civil society groups estimate more than 800 drug dens operate in Monrovia alone.

President Joseph Boakai has called addiction a public health threat and the government has poured more than $US3.5 million into drug programming in his first two years in office. There is $US3 million in the 2026 draft national budget for a multi sectorial anti-drug project.

The state supports Mother of Light with staff, food, medications, and technical resources. In Johnsonville, a transit facility now houses about 217 people in early-stage detox before referral to full rehabilitation according to Dr. Moses Ziah II, Director of Mental Health at the Ministry of Health and chair of the government’s technical working group on drug abuse. And a second rehabilitation center is planned.

“The Youth Agricultural Training Center in Bensonville is being renovated to become a national rehabilitation site, expected to hold roughly 100–120 beds per dormitory, with space for more in the future,” Dr Ziah says. He describes addiction as a brain disease requiring voluntary, structured care, not just raids and arrests.

The expansion of treatment facilities reflects a major shift in approach from the Weah administration which leaned on law enforcement alone to address the problem. Without rehabilitation support a range of amateur centers sprung up across the country to serve families desperate for help. A recent Front Page/New Narratives investigation found these centers – run by untrained providers including politicians and former warlords, charging big fees – had little chance of delivering long term recovery.

Since the program began, 115 people have graduated from inpatient care, while more than 500 have passed through outpatient counseling in Congo Town and Buchanan, 230 of that number are currently active. Curtis estimates just one in ten have relapsed after the inpatient program.

But experts say ongoing support will be necessary to help people like Princess stay clean long term. In the U.S. fifty percent of people with drug addictions have achieved long term recovery when treatment is combined with counseling, family support and stable housing.  

In a country where more than half people live in poverty and jobs for the growing youth population are scarce experts say Liberia’s weakest link now is not detox, but what happens afterward.

“Integration support is our biggest challenge,” says Artinique Curtis, Mother of Light’s administrative coordinator. “People think rehab is a magic cure, but it takes readjustment. It takes going back to school. It takes learning skills. All that takes money.”

Without structured reintegration, housing checks, school fees, job pathways, family mediation, experts warn rehab risks becoming a revolving door.

Families carry scars too

Reintegration is not only a fight for the person recovering. It is also a test for families that spent years living with fear.

Joyce, whose teenage son is in treatment at Mother Light  after years in Monrovia’s ghettos, says relapse is what terrifies most parents. But she believes her son’s recovery is different because he asked for help himself. “He came to me and said, ‘Mama, I’m tired now, I need you to help me,’” she says.

Still, she worries about what waits outside. Communities that once beat her son for stealing to buy drugs may not be ready to trust him again.

The stigma outside rehab walls remains strong. Many former users return to places where their addiction once made them violent, erratic, or dependent on theft. Families carry scars too and not everyone is ready to forgive.

Rachel, 27, who left inpatient treatment at Mother of Light in August 2024, says addiction didn’t only break her, it broke the household around her. Her father lost his job from the stress; her mother was constantly ill.

Now clean for more than a year, and a senior student at African Methodist Episcopal University, she says avoiding drugs is a daily battle.

“Recovery is a lifetime journey,” Rachel says. “It’s possible you will relapse, whenever that happens, go back to your source and seek help.”

Terry, another graduate, left Mother of Light in February after spending a year and six months in treatment. The longer time came not because he needed more detox time, but because he had nowhere safe to go after treatment.

He was integrated, ready to restart, but was stopped short by a brutal reality: no housing.

“I didn’t have, a place to live,” he says. “I didn’t want to lose the effort. So, I asked the Mother of Light family to come back to the program until I can get a place.”

Terry says that decision likely saved him from relapse. In the ghetto, he survived for 16 years at a place known as “Fuel Oil Water’ – behind the Liberia Electricity Corporation in New Kru Town – where daily life meant theft, beatings, and hunger.

Terry remembers the darker days of his addiction with a clarity that still shakes him. Before entering treatment, he says, he had become deeply entangled in the criminal networks that dominate many of Monrovia’s ghettos.

He recalls a night that he was with a friend who was caught and beaten to death. Terry describes the experience as a wake up call. But addiction, he says, doesn’t release its victims gently.

“This is a situation that you cannot just say you want to leave today,” he says. “Yes, you can feel bad, but the withdrawal symptoms from drugs, it is very, very much terrible. It can even kill you if you don’t have a strong system.”

He said his greatest fear now is going back to addiction. “Seeing myself going back to drugs is like I’m losing my own life.”

On her graduation day Princess has a strong warning for young Liberians: drugs do not only steal your body; they steal your place in society. “Substance abuse is not good,” she says. “When you take substance, no one will respect you and people will look down on you.”

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia Project. Funding was provided by the Swedish Embassy in Liberia. The funder had no say in the story’s content.