When the spectre first reared its head, many of us thought an illusion was raised. In the conversations of the day we believed it was a diversion. Someone from outside of us was crafting a scare to disrupt the discourse of the moment. As a society, we refused to admit, what was real. That was our first encounter with the talk of drug addiction.
Then it spread, and spread deep inside the societal veins. Our families, our neighbourhoods, our schools, and all our societal spaces sensed the smoke. But by then the fire had spread. Our young ones kept dying in mysterious circumstances. Some instances were reported, many were not. We finally registered the encounter as real.
By the time different levels of societal leadership could build up some coherent response, may be develop some functional collaboration with the government initiatives against drug addiction, bigger disruptions hit us, drifting the two – state and the society – in opposite directions. And it was not that one hit the north pole and another south. No. One went downwards and disappeared completely. Another spread itself and occupied all the horizon.
Meanwhile the ghost of drugs possessed soul after soul, and cost us life after life. The devastation of families is now a story of every locality in Kashmir.
All of us have lost someone to drug addiction – a friend, an acquaintance, a relation, a colleague or someone in the family. It is so widespread that there is a danger of normalising its presence, and some say we are already past that phenomenon.
If that is the case, what are our options. Those who deal with this problem, in the government or outside, enumerate a slew of measures. They identify many key actors who can be effective in pushing this monster of drug addiction back into the bottle. We all know it by now.
Police has a huge role. Healthcare officials can significantly contribute. Community animators can chip in. Faith based organisations can dissuade youngsters from this curse. Schools and families need to put up a defence. All this is true, and all these elements of defence can cooperate to form a bigger defence. But there is something missing in the conversation.
When we talk of the causes of drug addiction we focus on individual victims and formulate our patterns of understanding. It goes like this; peer influence, family stress, failure in studies, a romance coming to nothing, or some other personal deprivation. Then we go into how the abusive substances are pedalled, and how the mafia works. When all this is collated we draw the design of our response.
That we have to be mindful of where our children spend time. That we have to engage with our children in positive ways. That we have to destress our children in case they encounter a failure in their career. That we have to boost their sense of morality.
That we have to create more sporting spaces for them. That we have to activate teachers, and preachers. That we have to have a robust mechanism to nab the culprits and punish them. That we have to dismantle the drug cartels and use all the force that is takes.
All this is true, but only this is not true. There is another level of truth, and someone needs to graduate this discussion to that level. We can have even more effective responses engendering at that level.
When a problem exists on such a scale, something is wrong with the collective. When this menace of drug addiction was making its first, solo appearances, we took something for something else.
Our collective mind was then intoxicated in some other way. That is how our individuals fell, one after another, to this monster. Our failure to guard our society from the dangers of drug addiction, by ascribing the agency to someone else, paved the way for this disaster. The drug addiction settled here because our collective mind refused to acknowledge it. We remained blind to our blindness.
Now is the stage when we could open the eyes and see the thing for what it is, and not for what we presumed it to be. But right now, nothing is right with us. As a society we are in a state of physical incapacitation.
It is that collective incapacity that gives the drug demon a free run. It needs a recovery of us as a collective. It needs small acts of leadership, and ownership, in the apparently insignificant parcels of our society, where this recovery can begin.
Unfortunately, the power-of-technology and the technology-of-power – and it is now a global phenomenon – insists on this collective incapacity of human societies.
Those who are in political spaces, of whatever kind, need to realise it. And those who man the structures of governance need to register this fact of collective paralysis of the societies, before framing a response against drug addiction.
If the foundational substance of a collective is ceaselessly abused, it manifests in different forms of societal degradation. God bless that great man of our history, Iqbal, who spoke about the organic connect between the ethical construction and political structure of a community.
If Kashmir’s Muslim society is allowed to rehabilitate through its own devices, drug addiction will disappear more quickly than it surfaced up in the last decade.
Author is Opinion Editor, Greater Kashmir
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK