Bhutan that had once asked young students to pick and uproot marijuana plants as part of a national awareness drive, finds itself caught in the vortex of a controversy. The department of youth and sports has now issued a circular to immediately disengage the students from being exposed to the menace.
Marijuana plants grow in abundance almost everywhere in this Himalayan kingdom, providing a ready fodder for smugglers. Alarmed over the growing incidents drug abuse, the Bhutan Ministry of Education had in 2005 initiated programme to uproot and destroy marijuana plants in order to spread the awareness about “evils of susbstance abuse”.
However, two years down, the move has triggered a controversy with a section in the royal governance feeling that uprooting marijuana plants is one thing and involving the students in the programme is another as it amounts to exposing the floodgates of the abuse to innocent minds.  
“I support that marijuana plants have to be uprooted, but it is not the job of school children,” Dasho Sonam Tobgay Dorji,director of Youth & Sports, told  Deccan Herald  on Friday. Since the onset of the exercise, the education department has so far neither conducted any survey nor a study to assess its impact.  “The proposal to stop involving the school children in the exercise is a good idea because by engaging them to do it is to expose them to the menace itself,”  headmaster of a school in Thimphu said.
The Youth department, according to Mr Dorji, has been developing facilities where besides sports and games, internet and music will be provided to   attract children from all walks of life. A counsellor will also be stationed for those who require counselling on the menace.
When the programme was undertaken in 2005, it was just a gesture to make people and students familiar with the ill-effects of drugs, executive director of Bhutan Narcotic Control Agency (BNCA) Kinley Dorji pointed out.
“We felt instead of letting ignorance prevail, awareness about the drug menace should be there in the society,” Mr Kinley Dorji argued.
Backfired   
But what he stopped short of conceding is that the intention has somewhat backfired.
Bhutan that shares a porous international border with India, also finds itself wedged between an infamous drug cartel operating through India, Nepal, Myanmar and Thailand besides Bangladesh. Hence, with a large section of students already exposed to plucking the plant, curbing the menace of substance abuse might prove to be more complex task in near future.