CM: Punjab Govt fighting a war on drug menace

Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Friday said that the State was fighting a war on drug menace and his Government has taken a number of bold decisions to stamp out this curse.“We have opened several drug de-addiction centres to provide the best suitable treatment to the drug addicts for their detoxification,” he said.

A network of rehabilitation centres has also been set up in the State for the rehabilitation of drug addicts to enable them to lead a happy life with self respect, the Chief Minister said.He lamented that the narcotics like heroine was smuggled into Punjab from Afghanistan via Pakistan and similarly, synthetic drugs were neither produced nor manufactured in our State. “On the law and order front, our Government has taken a tough posture against the drug traffickers who are indulging in the illegal smuggling of drugs across the state by taking stern actions against these offenders,” Badal said.

He also welcomed the recent decision of Rajasthan High Court directing the state government to ban the open sale of poppy husk and opium in their state. Badal hoped that this historic decision would be a major respite for Punjab as the majority of these narcotics were freely flown from Rajasthan.

Justifying the issue of transferring Sikh prisoners from other states to Punjab, the Chief Minister categorically said that our government has not committed anything wrong as we have not released rather only shifted them to state jails that too within the ambit of law of the land.

On the contrary, the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, an outfit of RSS, has even approached the Union Home Ministry to release all the Sikh prisoners lodged in different jails of the country on humanitarian grounds, he said.