“In the last two years drug users have become more self-destructive,” Charalampos wrote. “Especially in the region of Athens where the effects of economic crisis are more obvious.” According to him, it was around this time that sisa emerged on the market.
The basic ingredient of sisa is methamphetamine. Addicts have reported that it can also contain filler ingredients like battery acid, engine oil, shampoo and cooking salt. “There is no official data on that,” Charalampos told me. “The General Chemical State Laboratory of Greece hasn’t gotten enough samples to reach any conclusions yet.”
Whatever’s in it, in many ways sisa is the epitome of an austerity drug. The majority of its users are poor, often homeless, city dwellers reeling from the psychological and physical impacts of a country in the grip of total economic collapse. In a country so broke that upper-middle-class families reportedly ate their Christmas dinners in unheated homes so they could afford a turkey, many users’ habits have become unsustainable. Addicts who’ve been priced out of using smack, crack, and meth have turned to sisa, which costs as little as two euros a hit.
As with most cheap highs, sisa comes with some nasty side effects, including “insomnia, delusions, heart attacks and aggressiveness,” according to Charalampos. “It’s often compared with cocaine,” he said, though it acts faster, and the effects last longer than coke. “It’s the drug of the streets, produced in home-based laboratories.”
Sisa is the latest grim example in a global trend toward mass-produced synthetic drugs, from the skin-eating opiate cocktail krokodil in Siberia to South Africa’s new fascination with getting high from souped-up anti-AIDS meds to the bath-salts craze in America and the UK. These are cheap, DIY highs, so it’s no wonder that in poverty-stricken Greece, sisa has found a natural home.
