Narco-terrorism sapping vibrant Punjab

Punjab is in the grip of a deadly virus, a scourge which has wide ranging implications for the future – drug and substance abuse. The problem has reached such alarming proportions that the younger generation faces a bleak future. No one knows how it will manifest 10 years from now.

An entire generation bore the brunt of terrorism in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Thousands lost their lives. Even as the Punjabis overcame their grief and fought terror head on, the deadly drug menace gripped the state, threatening the generation which followed that of the terror victims. People living in the border areas of the state bore the brunt of terrorism, now they are face to face with the narco terror, slowly killing people.

I am not comparing the two situations. But the plight of an average Punjabi mother or wife living in the rural areas of the border districts is the same. Mothers lost their sons and wives lost their husbands during the height of terrorism in the entire 1980s and first half of the 1990s. Now, mothers are losing their sons and wife their husbands to drugs. Earlier, the cult of violence was visible with gun toting men moving around, now drug abuse too is visible with the youth dying a slow, meaningless and painful death.

Drug abuse is no longer a secret in Punjab. Everybody in the state knows someone who has either died because of it or is a drug addict. Every person in the state knows someone who is into substance abuse and has done irreparable damage to himself. There are families where all the male members are addict and they work only to get their quota of the intoxicant, not to take care of their families.

In border districts and cities like Amritsar, petty crime like chain or bag snatchings, waylaying the pedestrians and robbing them are committed only to get some money to get the quota of drugs. These drug addicts and couriers are also in the bigger crime and it has sort of become a part of the parallel economy in these areas.

An Inspector General, earlier posted in the Border Zone, helplessly told me that the problem has reached a magnitude where only a war like intensive effort would help neutralise it and that too it will take several years if started right now.

“We had cut the supply line of drugs. We tried surveillance and enforcement, resulting in the smugglers getting arrested and the addicts starved for drugs. Village elders pleaded that people will die if they do not get their quota. I saw people suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms which even led to deaths,” said the police official. So no one wants the supply lines cut. “If people take drugs, they will die in say 3-5 years. If it is stopped forthwith, some of them could die in a month,” he said, pointing to the need of setting up rehabilitation centres on a war footing and why the village elders do not want the supply lines cut without any plan to rehabilitate the addicts.

Another enforcement official saw a correlation between massive amounts of drugs seized in the months of September and October this year and the Punjab assembly elections. He did not want to divulge but indicated that some candidates for the assembly elections could be hoarding drugs to supply them during the elections and the seizures could only be the tip of iceberg. “The entire border belt from Ferozpur to Pathankot has witnessed hectic activity on the part of the smugglers recently. They are becoming innovative from throwing the drugs from Pakistan to their Indian couriers waiting near the fenced border to using the shallow water in the rivers to cross the border and deliver the drugs,” he said.

In fact, not a single day passes when the Punjab Police or the BSF does not recover a huge quantity of poppy, opium, synthetic drugs and what not. The amount of drugs floating in Punjab is mind boggling so much so that police officials say that it was futile guessing it. The source of these drugs could be smuggling from Afghanistan via Pakistan, the inaccessible hills areas of Himachal Pradesh, some quantity from Nepal and also pilferage from the state controlled poppy farms in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Leave alone the known intoxicants and drugs, when I came here six moths ago, only then I came to know that Correction Fluid, used to rectify typing mistakes, is used as a drug by some. Pain killers and tablets to mitigate stomach ache is taken to get a high. A politician from the Doaba belt told me that mothers in the area pleaded with him to get chemist shops closed in the area as they were selling cough syrups, pain killers etc to the addicts and such shops were of no use to the community.

In fact a Punjab Government survey sometime ago had revealed that 66 per cent of the school-going students in the state consume gutkha or tobacco; every third male and every tenth female student has taken drugs on one pretext or the other and seven out of 10 college-going students abuse one or the other drug.

An affidavit in the Punjab and Haryana High Court admitted that the vibrancy of Punjab is virtually a myth and many even sell their blood to procure their daily doze of deadly drugs, even beg on the streets for money to continue their addiction. It used the word “drug hurricane” to describe the situation which has gripped the state. Multiple drug dependence is the latest bane in which the addicts get into several drugs at a time or simultaneously.

It is not surprising that Punjab has lost its sporting talent and no new sportspersons are coming on the national stage from the state. Instead, Haryana has marched ahead and most of the sportspersons from the northern region are not from Punjab as was the case a few years ago.

I am sure the policy makers, politicians running the state and those in the Opposition, and the bureaucrats know much more than I do on the prevalence of drug abuse in the state. It was time they acted rather then let Punjab fritter away its youth and talent to the menace. (13 November, 2011)

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