A Trip To Rehab With Zanzibar’s Heroin Addicts

DAR ES SALAAM — Sitting on a stone bench, in a shaded back alley of the historical center of Stone Town, the capital of the Zanzibar archipelago, Ali Nassor Ali is making the most of his last day in the open air. Tomorrow, this 40-year-old man with a gaunt face and eyes reddened by years of drug addiction goes to rehab.

Of the approximately 1 million inhabitants on this island, located about 25 kilometers off the coast of Dar es Salaam, the economic capital of Tanzania, an estimated 10,000 are addicted to heroin. Ali Nassor Ali is one of the them.

Fifteen minutes away from here, past the UNESCO-designated monuments and tourist shops, a bumpy path leads to the entrance of a large house surrounded by a decaying gate. On the other side of the gate a dozen men are talking while smoking cigarettes.

Across the yard a workout session is being improvised. Two giants with sculpted torsos are lifting cement weights in a building that was opened in 2008 thanks to donations by a U.S. NGO from Detroit. It's here, in the Detroit Sober House, as it's called, that Ali Nassor Ali will spend the next few months.

The person behind the project is Suleiman Mauly, 32. Mauly did his own stint in rehab, in Kenya, following a nearly eight-year addiction to heroin. “Back in Stone Town, I wanted to set up a structure and I was backed by a U.S. NGO," he says. "At the time, there was no care center in Zanzibar and in Tanzania. Now, users come from the whole of Eastern Africa to receive treatment here.”

Since the early 1990s, Eastern Africa has been one of the world’s transit points for heroin traffic. From Pakistan or...