ISTANBUL — On June 23, I was in a taxi in Istanbul that took a wrong turn and ended up in a neighborhood where a group of young men were crowded onto a street corner, chatting loudly. The driver, who had already informed me that he was a full-time physical education teacher and part-time taxi driver, pointed to the young people and said, “These are the druggies, and they are all over these impoverished neighborhoods now. It's gotten worse in the last couple of years.”

For decades poor Turkish youths have been sniffing “torba,” a bag filled with a mixture of cheap chemicals, to get a quick high. When I asked the driver if he was referring to torba, he said, “That's passe. The kids now use some kind of chemical drug, “bonzai” — as in the tiny, precious Japanese bonsai trees, but spelled with a "z" in Turkish.

On the same day, it was announced that a 20-year-old conscript, Volkan Senyurt, while home in Basaksehir, Istanbul, had died using this new drug. It also made the news that an 18-year-old boy had died from a bonzai overdose in Bursa.

The next day, having traveled to Dudullu, a neighborhood in Istanbul’s conservative Umraniye district, was another eye-opener. A drug addict’s mother told Al-Monitor, “My son is 22 years old. I had to kick him out of the house because of his addiction. I discovered he was abusing bonzai two years ago, then I learned that he had given some to his sister. She is only 12 years old. That is when I had to ask him to leave. I fear of hearing bad news every day.”