One thing I know about drugs, is that you can never win with them. Doesn’t matter if they’re the only friends you have during a low point of your life; there’s no winning with drugs and that stands. And from Jackie Chandiru’s experience, you can say that statement is pretty accurate.
Chandiru is and will always be one of the most phenomenal artists to ever exist on the Ugandan music scene. She and her former group Blue 3 are probably a significant part of the beginning of contemporary music in the Ugandan art industry. After the group split, all 3 musicians took different paths in their careers, and it’s safe to say Jackie has had the most unstable music career in the recent years of the three due to afflictions she has faced due to drug abuse.
Images went wildly around the media of Chandiru looking heavily afflicted and ill, some had her with needle marks and wounds on her arms. This shocked a lot of people considering the very fine appearance she maintained in the years prior to her drug addiction. Of course many concluded she was abusing drugs and that led to her horrifying physical and mental state, a dreadful path that a lot of musicians take, and they were not wrong.
A lot of the news we’ve been hearing about Chandiru has been hearsay and some of it hasn’t been trusted as accurate as the artist has kept this part of her life on a low. She recently appeared on a local TV station after a very long time to talk about her struggles with rehabilitation and some of the downs of her life while recovering from addiction. As you can imagine, it’s big news that she herself came out to talk about this after being so hidden from the public eye for so long.
“I didn’t like rehab when I was taken there. My life had definitely transformed from the solace of my home to this spot. At the point when I was being taken, I offended everybody. I even got away and there was a quest for me,” Chandiru recounted on TV.
Jackie’s journey to and fro rehab has been quite the long one. Word has it that she was taken to several obscure locations for treatment and close observation; all the way from Bunamwaya Rehabilitation to Nairobi, Kenya for top notch clinical consideration. It became alarming when it was revealed she was close to passing away from a lethal illness, around the time she was being treated for chronic drug abuse.
She went ahead to advise her fellow artists from drug use, saying “When I was in rehab, I thought about many things; my life, music, name to mention but a few than also looked at how drugs had affected me. It was a tough moment for me and I wouldn’t advise any fellow artists to try them.”
As aforementioned, there’s no winning with drugs. The most we can do is support those that are affected by them in any way that can help get them out of their plight instead of isolating them, making matters worse.
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