The land of bravehearts and warriors, Punjab, today is in the grip of a severe drug addiction crisis which is feeding on its young population of all strata. The State Department of the Social Security And Development of Women and Children's website says that 53% men and 48% women are addiction prone. SHAlINI SAKSENA looks into the issue
Maqboolpura, a small village near Amritsar that was once labeled as the ‘village of widows and orphans’ because practically every household had lost a family member to drug addiction is showing that if there is a will, there can be a way. In the late 1990s and early 2000, addictions to alcohol, synthetic drugs, morphine injections, charas, ganja, opium and smack spelt doom for this village where the school drop-out rate was 70 per cent. Alarmingly, children had become addicts.
Cut to 2016. The village is scripting history. “Though there is still a lot of work to be done, the good news is that villagers are now aware of the consequences of taking drugs. To begin with, it was an uphill task to convince families and children that education was important and the only way to improve lives. Slowly, some children joined school, the Citizens’ Forum Vidya Mandir. Of the 450 students in this school today, more that 50 per cent have a single parent (mostly mothers), others are orphans. People realise that only they can change their lives. The mothers work as domestic help to support their families and ensure that their child attends school. Most families have been issued BPl cards for provisions at low rates,” Government school teacher Ajit Singh, working on free education to children of addicts since 1999, says.
Maqboolpura may be coming out of rehab slowly, but the rest of the State continues to struggle with its all-strata-all-age-group highs so it was only a matter of time that a movie was made on the drug abuse. Udta Punjab talks about the drug menace in Punjab, but what is shown on the 70 mm screen doesn’t even come close to the reality on the ground. The severity of the problem can be gauged from the fact that you have 11 and 12-year-olds taking to drugs.
Amritsar-based addiction psychiatrist Dr JPS Bhatia recounts how he treated an 11-year-old for opium addiction. “When I asked him how and why he started taking it, he said a friend in school had got it and everyone was trying it and he wanted to experiment too,” Bhatia recalls.
He narrates another tale of a 15-year-old who had come to him with anger issues. “He was from a family owning a chain of hotels. But the six-member family, including grandparents, had no time for each other. It all started with the boy having vodka after school which slowly turned to addiction. He said his friends introduced him to marijuana and that he didn’t see anything wrong in having alcohol as his parents were heavy drinkers,” Bhatia tells you.
The scale of drug abuse in the State came into limelight in 2009 through a submission to the Punjab and Haryana High Court by Harjit Singh, Secretary of the Department of Social Security and Women and Child Development in Chandigarh. Since then, a number of studies and reports have come out showing how the State has fallen prey to narco-terrorism.
So much so that around 70 per cent of the youth in the State are addicts and about 66 per cent schoolchildren have used drugs at some point. Another report says that from men aged between 18 and 35 years, four in 100 are opioid dependent, while 15 in 100 can be opioid users. But it was a 2015 study by the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS along with NGO Society for Promotion of Youth and Masses that sent alarm bells ringing.
The study that covered the 10 districts of Bathinda, Ferozepur, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Moga, Sangrur, Patiala and Tarn Taran found that up to Rs2.5 crore a day is spent by addicts on purchasing drugs and that over Rs7,500 crore worth of drugs were being consumed in the State annually. What worried the doctors most was that 80 per cent of the patients brought to the centre had tried quitting drugs, but only 35 per cent succeeded.
Shashi Kant, former DGP (Jails), Punjab, explains. “Punjab became a route for drugs around 300 BC and has been traditionally an alcohol drinking region. Since it fell on the Silk Route, like all other trade items, opiates (heroine and its derivatives) also landed in Punjab. When the invaders came from Central Asia, they brought with them a huge population of opium addicts,” Kant says.
There are two major opium producing areas — the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, laos, Thailand and surrounding areas on the North eastern side of India) and the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan and surrounding areas). In the Crescent, a poppy cultivation area, opium was being used as an addiction and a medicine. The region saw a boom in opium production between 1979-1989 because the mujahideens got on to its profits to purchase arms and started looking for a new route to sell it. In the mid-80s, they found Punjab.
Back then, terrorists would attack liquor shops and alcoholics, so injecting drugs became safer. Since shops were attacked, it dried up an easy source of money for the terrorists. Hawala transactions took time. There was a need to look for quick money.
The drugs coming from Afghanistan via Pakistan into India from where it reached Delhi and other cities before being shipped out to other countries, found a new market en route. Newspaper reports give you the trail and the money involved. Heroin is bought from Afghanistan at Rs1 lakh per kg. Passing through Pakistan, it is smuggled into Punjab and sold at Rs30 lakh per kg. From Punjab, it is sold to the rest of the country for Rs1crore per kg. From India, it is then sold in the international market for Rs5 crore per kg.
But how a State considered to be the wheat bowl of India, become a State of addictsIJ The answer is simple. “Once terrorism receded, the prices of real estate shot up. People, who had lost source of income because they were afraid to go out and work during the 80s, sold their land. They became rich overnight. People of Punjab, considered to be hard working, took the easy way out. They started hiring labour from States like Bihar and UP. The youth had nothing to do and doing drugs started to become common,” Kant tells you. Also, land owners started givingbhuki (poppy husk) to labourers to increase their productivity. They found that the husk boiled in water increased output. Instead of working eight hours in the field, the labour could now put in longer hours without getting tired, a myth that is yet to be ascertained. Slowly, it became common practice across the State. What they didn’t realise was that they were getting addicted to it.
Then came the 90s and the era of synthetic and designer drugs. This meant that the drugs reached the cities. The age group of 18 to 35 started to experiment. “With no jobs, the youth got stressed and peer pressure led them to drugs,” Kant says.
Bhatia attributes the wildfire spread of this scourge to the confusion that the youth is facing today. “Punjabis have been a warrior class and invasions by the likes of Mohammed Ghazni left a mark on popular psyche as our women were violated, children killed and homes destroyed. Those were chaotic times. As time passed, it became a psychogenic pain that people were unable to deal with as it remained unresolved for centuries. Then came the Partition in 1947 and terrorism in the 80s which lasted a decade. This opened old wounds, creating a void making the youth vulnerable to change. Unemployment, no proper de-addiction centres and lack of trained medics and awareness about the effects of addiction, worsened the situation,” Bhatia tells you.
A major problem is that people don’t want to accept they are addicts. “They feel that the situation is under control and they can leave alcohol and drugs at any time. But that is incorrect. They don’t realise is that drinking is the first step towards drugs,” Bhatia adds.
Founder of the Anti Drug Federation in Punjab Sanjeev Khan agrees. “Punjab has a history of drinking. There are families where the husband and wife drink the night away. It is the children who are sent to the theka to buy alcohol. The child’s curiosity piques and he too starts drinking. For most parents, drinking is more important than sending their child to school since every rupee spent on education means that it is a rupee spent less on alcohol. Slowly, when alcohol consumption stops giving them a high, they go to the next level, alcohol is the primary step to doing drugs. Also, there is the labour class. After a hard day’s work, they need a drink,” Khan explains.
Counselling is the key for such people. “It is not as if others forced the drug down their throat. People need to be aware of how it ruins lives. Take the case of a young executive who came to us with alcohol addiction. We tried to explain to him the harmful effects of drinking but wouldn’t understand. We asked him why he didn’t let his mother, sister and wife also drinkIJ He took offence and walked out. So the main challenge is to make people listen to you. Moreso, when it is a drug which gives them a high and temporarily keeps problems at bay,” Khan says.
Another problem is lack of treatment centres in the State. “There are many who claim to cure addictions. But truth is that there are only a handful of centres that offer proper treatment,” Khan says. That is the reason why addiction has seeped into every strata of society, making the problem manifold. Businessmen, transport workers, labourers, farmers, women and children — all are consuming drugs.
“Easy availability is the root cause. Besides opiates and other drugs, there are many painkillers available over the counter with no prescription making it easy for 12-year-olds to buy them. The fact that these children are even inhaling petrol to get a high only highlights the penetration of drug use in the State,” Kant tells you.
Even with the setting up of anti-drug operations, with four field units — Bathinda, ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar — headed by an assistant inspector general of police (AIG) each in 2014, the Narcotics Control Bureau in 2015 found that there was no let-up in the drug menace as the State registered 50 per cent of the total drug-related cases in the country — out of a total 30,000 cases of drug peddling registered nationwide, 15,000 were from Punjab.
According to an in-house study by the Bhatia Neuropsychiatric Hospital and De-addiction Centre, around 80 per cent of young people in Amritsar are taking drugs, 58 per cent start drugs before they reach 20 and 80 per cent addicts are in the age group of 20-30 years.
“The study was conducted on the basis of the number of addicts that we used to get in our drug rehab and de-addiction centre. We do detox programmes which are for seven days and a rehab programme that is for one to three months. On an average, we get 70-100 people in OPD daily. On any given day, we have 20 in-house addicts of which five are women,” Bhatia tells you.
Since one addict ropes in at least seven into addiction, there are 65 per cent smack addicts in the city as against eight per cent alcoholics. In the 90s, this figure stood at just two per cent, in 2000 it went up to 51 per cent in and in 2002 the figure was 66 per cent. The reason why such large number of people are taking drugs is because drugs are popular among the youth and their prices have reduced. Smack which was earlier sold at Rs450 per gm can be now bought for just Rs250 per gm. The study points to an increase in suicide cases, accidental deaths, crime and various psychiatric disorders among addicts and that agriculturists and unemployed were more prone to addiction.
But there is some good news and some bad according to a Government doctor, working in Tarn Taran. “While the situation continues to be grim, there have been crackdowns on peddlers and smugglers. Also, prices of some drugs have increased making denying easy accessibility to new users,” the doctor says.
So while there is a decrease in demand for expensive drugs, it has led to an increase in the demand for OTC drugs like painkillers and cough syrups. Economically weaker sections are soft targets have become small-time peddlers supplying drugs to four to five people in lieu of getting their fix. “There is need to look at these people with empathy and provide them treatment rather than incarceration. Also, each region in the State has a different kind of drug user. Border areas are more prone to doing heroin and smack. Villagers around the Rajasthan border are happily high on poppy husk. Cities have designer drugs,” the doctor says, adding that the best way to curb this menace is to cut the demand-supply chain.
Kant calls for a statutory State anti-narcotics commission to be headed by dedicated individuals with good knowledge of the issue with Director General of Police and Principal Secretaries of all departments like Health, Social Welfare and Sports & Youth Affairs as ex officio co-chairpersons.
“Second, a serious and sustained crackdown on the smugglers is urgently needed followed by an intense de-addiction programme. This will save many lives. There should be dedicated de-addiction centres in all districts with counselors and psychiatrists. This menace can be controlled only through a multi-pronged strategy involving the police, health, social welfare and the sports departments with co-ordination among them,” Kant tells you.
The police should launch an overall offensive against the drug smugglers and peddlers, registration of cases and their legal follow up, including conviction and attachment of their properties. “But this is not being done because of their other time-taking duties like maintaining law and order, prevention and detection of crime, security duties, etc. The health department needs to have a comprehensive policy on de-addiction and the same goes for the social welfare and the Sports and Youth Affairs departments. Unless this is done on a war-footing, the drug trail in Punjab will continue,” Kant says.
Factfile