I Ahmad Wani
There is a particular cruelty to drug addiction that sets it apart from most public health crises. It does not announce itself with the drama of an epidemic or the visible devastation of a flood. It enters quietly — through a school corridor, through a shared syringe in a forgotten alley, through the anxious generosity of a peer — and then, with relentless patience, dismantles the architecture of a life. In Jammu and Kashmir, where families have already weathered decades of conflict, displacement, and post-traumatic grief, this quiet devastation has arrived with especial force. The numbers, now being spoken aloud with an honesty that was long absent from official discourse, are staggering in their human cost.
Over 13.48 lakh adults in the Union Territory are estimated to be using addictive substances. Among them, 4.47 lakh are opioid users, with heroin carrying a dependency rate of 88.8 per cent — a figure that tells you, with clinical bluntness, how narrow the window between first use and enslavement truly is. Heroin seizures across the UT grew more than fivefold in just four years, climbing from 15 kilograms in 2018 to 80 kilograms in 2022, with more recent crackdowns in late 2024 and early 2025 recovering over 28 kilograms worth Rs 129 crore in street value in a single sweep. Approximately 70 per cent of drug users at IMHANS — the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Srinagar — test positive for Hepatitis C. More than 33,000 syringes are reportedly used daily by heroin addicts across the UT. Perhaps most hauntingly, around 1.68 lakh of the affected are minors between the ages of 10 and 17, with studies indicating that initiation begins at age 11 in some communities.
It is against this landscape of numbers — each one a story of a fractured family, a diverted future, a parent who cried in the night — that Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha launched the 100-day *Nasha Mukt Jammu and Kashmir Abhiyan* on April 11, 2026, from the MA Stadium in Jammu. And it is in this context that the campaign deserves not merely acknowledgement but genuine, sustained praise — tempered, as honest assessment must be, by a sober understanding of what structural reform the crisis still demands.
The Geography of Addiction
To understand Jammu and Kashmir’s drug crisis, one must understand its geography — not merely as terrain, but as history and geopolitics compressed into landscape. The UT shares its western and northern borders with Pakistan-administered territories and is positioned directly in the shadow of the Golden Crescent — the Afghanistan-Iran-Pakistan triangle that is among the world’s most prolific sources of heroin and opiates. The same porous routes that have historically allowed militants, arms, and foreign currency to infiltrate the region have, over the past two decades, been increasingly exploited for narco-trafficking. Lt. Governor Sinha was not resorting to rhetorical flourish when he stated that cross-border networks are using narcotics as a tool to destabilise the region. The observation has the backing of seizure data, intelligence reports, and the grim epidemiology of addiction hotspots clustered disproportionately along border districts.
The situation is further compounded by the Union Territory’s proximity to Punjab — India’s most drug-afflicted state. As per a 2022 study by the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), 15.4 per cent of Punjab’s population — roughly 66 lakh people — uses narcotics. Over a decade from 2015 to 2024, the state recorded more than 51,000 NDPS cases and the seizure of over 4,600 kilograms of heroin. In Punjab’s prisons, 42.1 per cent of the population is linked to the NDPS Act, a statistic that speaks simultaneously to enforcement effort and rehabilitation failure. Punjab’s drug epidemic, now entering its third decade of recorded crisis, functions as a cautionary tale and, tragically, also as a source route for substances that flow further east and south into J&K.
The national picture compounds the urgency. A landmark survey by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in 2019 — conducted in partnership with the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS — revealed that approximately 5.7 crore Indians, constituting 5.2 per cent of the population, consumed cannabis and opioids. Of these, nearly 72 lakh required treatment for opioid dependence. More than 1.18 crore people were injecting drug users, placing themselves at dramatically elevated risk of HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C. Arrests under the NDPS Act rose from 73,841 in 2020 to 1,16,098 in 2024 — a 57 per cent increase that reflects rising enforcement vigour but also the accelerating scale of the problem itself. Drug seizures worth Rs 16,914 crore were recorded nationally in 2024 alone, a number that staggers the imagination until one grasps what it represents: the visible fraction of an underground economy with ramifications for public health, crime, and national security simultaneously.
What Makes This Campaign Different
There is, as one commentator has aptly noted, a *ritual grammar* to anti-narcotics campaigns in India — the stadium ceremony, the pledge, the padyatra, the banners invoking the children of the nation. Cynicism is understandable. Campaigns have been launched before; the crisis has persisted. What, then, makes the Nasha Mukt Jammu and Kashmir Abhiyan deserving of confidence rather than scepticism?
Several features distinguish it structurally from its predecessors. First, it was not born of political optics alone. The April 9 meeting at Raj Bhavan — where Lt. Governor Sinha directed every department of the UT administration to align its machinery with the 100-day timeline — represented an unusual instance of whole-of-government mobilisation. Social Welfare, Health, Education, Home, and Police were drawn into a single, coordinated framework. This inter-departmental convergence, routinely absent from India’s fragmented anti-drug efforts, is itself a meaningful departure.
Second, the enforcement response has been immediate and measurable. Within just five days of the campaign’s launch, more than 45 FIRs were registered and 63 smugglers arrested. Cases registered after April 11 saw a threefold increase in the first week. The administration has notified a new Standard Operating Procedure mandating the cancellation of passports, Aadhaar cards, driving licences, and arms licences of traffickers, alongside asset attachment and financial investigation under the NDPS Act. This targeting of the economic infrastructure of trafficking — rather than merely pursuing the foot-soldiers of peddling — marks a maturation in enforcement strategy. A trafficker’s passport and property are often more consequential instruments of disruption than a prison sentence whose enforcement can be uncertain.
Third, and most significantly, the administration has given legal scaffolding to the rehabilitation arm of the campaign through the newly notified J&K Substance Use Disorder Treatment, Counselling and Rehabilitation Centres Rules, 2026. This regulatory framework — standardising de-addiction infrastructure, defining treatment protocols, and providing a mechanism to identify and shut down the predatory fake de-addiction centres that have thrived in the vacuum of regulation — addresses a gap that national policy has long identified but inadequately resolved. The Parliamentary Standing Committee had as recently as 2023 noted that barely 30 per cent of India’s Integrated Rehabilitation Centres for Addicts were functioning at full capacity, with most lacking psychiatrists, psychologists, and trained counsellors. J&K’s new rules constitute a direct legislative response to that documented failure.
Fourth, the campaign has consciously embraced the social dimension of addiction recovery. The Lt. Governor’s directive for weekly audits — tracking rehabilitated individuals, prosecuted smugglers, shuttered fake centres, and newly registered cases — imposes an accountability structure that most campaigns lack. The launch of sports leagues such as the Rajouri Premier League, Rajouri Football Club, and the Samba Cricket Premier League under the Abhiyan’s umbrella reflects an understanding that youth require positive spaces, not merely warnings. Anti-drug debates, quizzes, cultural programmes, and community marches belong not to the cosmetics of a campaign but to the deeper architecture of prevention. The research on addiction is unambiguous: young people who have purpose, belonging, and structured activity are significantly more resistant to initiation.
The Voices of the Movement
What strikes an observer following the campaign across districts is the quality of the public response. At Samba on April 25, the Lt. Governor addressed a large gathering and made a remark that deserves to be held apart from official pronouncements for its accuracy: “This fight cannot be won by law alone — it must be won within society, through awareness, cooperation, and collective effort.” This is not the language of a government event; it is the language of a public health practitioner who understands that coercive enforcement, unaccompanied by community ownership, produces at best a displacement of trafficking patterns.
The participation of parents, elders, school teachers, local panchayat representatives, and — crucially — survivors willing to speak openly about their experiences marks a turn from the culture of shame that has historically made addiction invisible and therefore untreatable. In communities where acknowledging a family member’s addiction once invited social ostracism, the campaign has created sanctioned spaces for honest conversation. This is not a trivial achievement.
The UT administration’s assertion that more than 4.35 lakh individuals have been directly engaged through the Abhiyan, with over 90 lakh people reached through awareness drives, points to a scale of social mobilisation rarely achieved in public health campaigns. Padyatras in Baramulla, Rajouri, Samba, and other districts have carried the campaign beyond urban centres into the villages and neighbourhoods where addiction is experienced most viscerally but addressed least systematically.
What the Next Eighty-Five Days Must Deliver
Praise, to be honest, must also be demanding. The first fifteen days of the Nasha Mukt Abhiyan have demonstrated intent. The remaining eighty-five days must demonstrate durability and depth.
The treatment gap remains the campaign’s most formidable structural adversary. An average heroin addict in the Valley reportedly spends approximately Rs 90,000 per month sustaining the habit — a figure that reveals both the desperation driving property crime and the colossal financial flows sustaining trafficking networks. Yet the de-addiction infrastructure to absorb recovering addicts remains inadequate. Nationally, nearly 80 per cent of de-addiction centres are concentrated in urban areas; the rural addict, often the most economically vulnerable and the most disconnected from formal services, is the hardest to reach and the easiest to relapse. The UT administration must ensure that the new Rehabilitation Centres Rules translate not just into regulatory elegance but into functioning, staffed, compassionately run facilities in the districts that need them most.
The question of injecting drug users demands special urgency. With 33,000 syringes used daily across the UT, the co-epidemic of Hepatitis C — present in 70 per cent of IMHANS patients — is a public health emergency running alongside the addiction crisis. Harm reduction approaches, including needle exchange programmes and Opioid Substitution Therapy, have robust evidence behind them globally but have historically been resisted in India’s enforcement-dominant policy framework. The new campaign’s emphasis on rehabilitation over criminalisation of users is encouraging; the administration should go further and explicitly integrate harm reduction into its de-addiction architecture.
The conviction rate problem must also be addressed. Nationally, despite 1,16,098 NDPS arrests in 2023, only 110 convictions were recorded for high-level traffickers. The entire deterrence argument for aggressive enforcement rests on the credibility of prosecution and sentencing. Fast-track courts, robust evidence chains, and financial investigation capacity must be built alongside the padyatras.
A Region That Has Earned the Right to Heal
There is a dimension to Jammu and Kashmir’s drug crisis that statistics, however sobering, do not adequately capture: the region’s particular vulnerability to addiction rooted in the psychological aftermath of prolonged conflict. Decades of violence, displacement, bereavement, economic disruption, and the chronic anxiety of living in a contested geography have produced what mental health professionals recognise as mass traumatisation. Substance abuse in such contexts is not merely a law-and-order failure; it is, at least in part, a symptom of collective pain seeking relief in the only form readily available.
A campaign that treats addiction purely as a criminal phenomenon misses this dimension entirely. The Nasha Mukt Abhiyan, at its best, acknowledges it — treating addiction as illness, requiring empathy alongside enforcement, and building a framework where those struggling feel safe to seek help rather than fear prosecution. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah articulated this with appropriate clarity when he described the campaign as requiring addiction to be treated as an illness calling for empathy, care, and support rather than stigma.
Jammu and Kashmir is a region that has earned, many times over, the right to heal — from conflict, from injury, from the specific devastation of a generation lost to narcotics. The 100-day *Nasha Mukt Abhiyan* is an imperfect, ambitious, structurally serious attempt to provide the instruments of that healing. Its launch energy is real. Its legal and administrative architecture is more robust than most predecessors. Its community mobilisation has touched a scale and sincerity that deserve genuine recognition. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and the UT administration deserve praise — not the hollow variety dispensed at government functions, but the earned kind that acknowledges both what has been attempted and what the attempt demands of those who undertake it.
The next hundred days will not end the drug crisis in Jammu and Kashmir. No hundred days could. But they can build the institutional memory, the community trust, and the rehabilitative infrastructure that a sustained, generational effort will require. The youth of the Valley — studying in schools, dreaming of futures, standing at the precarious threshold between aspiration and addiction — are watching. They have waited long enough. Let the movement live beyond the stadium.
