'No Turning Back': Teens Abuse HIV Drugs

DURBAN, South Africa, April 6, 2009— -- A drug intended to treat HIV and AIDS is sweeping the townships of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It is cheap and powerfully addictive.

"Nightline" witnessed the drug's effects upclose on a 17-year-old addict we're calling Joshua to protect his identity. A high school junior from a middle-class neighborhood in Durban, he said his parents would kick him out of the house if they knew. And yet he smokes the drug every day before and after class, despite his dreams of becoming a doctor.

"Once you've first started there's no turning back," he said, adding that he wants to stop using but can't.

When he uses, "it feels like you got no problem at all. Like yesterday if you killed a person and you smoked this thing you wouldn't remember that you killed a person yesterday."

The drug Joshua and his friends are abusing is the anti-retroviral Efavirenz. When taken properly, it's part of a lifesaving treatment for HIV patients. When crushed and smoked, it's a cheap high with no medical benefit.

When the teenagers finished smoking, they didn't have to hide. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to be aware of what they're doing, and they say the same was true when they went to purchase the drug.

South Africa has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world and KwaZulu-Natal province has the highest rate in South Africa -- 40 percent. For the infected, anti-retroviral drugs, or ARVs, are the only things standing between life and a painful death.

The drug is so cheap and plentiful, thanks in part to a well-meaning effort by the American government to distribute ARV', a program that has helped extend the lives of more than 500,000 AIDS patients.

But as the medical director of one U.S.-funded clinic said, ARV abuse is threatening to turn an HIV success story into a health crisis.

"It's extremely frustrating," said Dr. Njabulo Masabo, from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. "It's extremely, you know, discouraging because on one end you're trying to fight this epidemic that has ravaged the world so much ... the results are catastrophic."