by Appu Esthose Suresh
Young men in Angad, an impoverished settlement in the heart of Amrtisar city, do not take kindly to strangers. With reason, as, according to the police, every male member at Angad’s Hindustan Basti is a drug addict. A group of young men disperses as this correspondent walks by, and a little later, another group quietly asks, “Chahiye [Do you want some]?”
Drug addicts stand aimlessly around the Basti giving legitimacy to Punjab Finance Minister S. Manpreet Badal’s claim, “Punjab is in the grip of a drugs hurricane.” An affidavit filed by Harjit Singh, secretary with Punjab’s Department of Social Security, states that 16% of the population of Punjab is hooked to hard drugs. Although the only available survey that covers the entire State of Punjab was conducted in the year 2000, it talks volumes about the extent of drug abuse. According to this survey, 67% of rural households in Punjab have at least one drug addict in the family. Satish Chandra, Health Secretary to the Punjab Government, in a candid admission to Covert said that the figures could only be worse today.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime maintains that Punjab has emerged as the new hub of drug trafficking. The State accounts for one-fifth of the total heroin confiscated in the country. Statistics provided to Covert by highly placed sources in the State Intelligence Bureau of the Punjab police reveal that 573.93 kg of heroin has been confiscated since 2005.
The sources pointed out that Punjab is vulnerable to drug trafficking because of its proximity to the “Golden Crescent” comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. In recent years, they said, drug traffickers from across the border have started using Punjab as their main supply line for sending illegal narcotics to the West. The porous border with Pakistan makes smuggling easy, but increased surveillance makes it difficult for traffickers to smuggle large quantities of drugs to other States. So they dump a good portion of the drugs and narcotics in Punjab where these are easily available at cheaper rates than in other States.
FINANCE MINISTER Badal blames drug abuse to unemployment and farmer-prosperity. He said, “The Green Revolution has made every farmer in Punjab relatively rich. Our new generation is not interested in agriculture. They want jobs in industries. But we are not able to become an industrialised State yet. So the disgruntled youth with money in plenty get distracted by such social evils.” Thirty-three-year-old Jagjot Singh has been undergoing treatment for drug abuse for the last three years. He is from a fairly prosperous family, and does not have to account for the money he spends. His parents used to live in the United States at one time. As a 15-year-old, he was curious and interested enough to try smack [heroin] for the first time at his friends’ insistence. It soon became an addiction. “Within three years I could not live without it. I dropped out of college,” says Jagjot. His parents stopped giving him financial support, so he became a driver. He started using drugs that could be injected. He remembers: “Every nerve in my body was going dry. I could not stand it and started acting like a mad person. It was scary and I decided finally to get rid of it somehow.”
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