Drug menace in Jammu and Kashmir: Where hope withers, addiction thrives

Kashmir’s growing drug crisis is no longer just a local public health concern. It is becoming one of India’s clearest warnings about what prolonged conflict, social stress and institutional fatigue can do to an entire generation of young people.

The most striking aspect of the crisis is that it is unfolding in a society long viewed as deeply conservative, religiously guided and socially regulated, where intoxicants historically carried strong social and moral stigma. Public drinking remained rare, community oversight was strong, and family as well as religious institutions traditionally acted as powerful checks against visible substance abuse. Yet today, heroin and synthetic drugs have penetrated schools, colleges, villages and urban neighbourhoods at an alarming speed. 

This contradiction challenges many assumptions India holds about addiction.

Drug epidemics do not emerge only from permissive urban cultures. They also grow out of anxiety, emotional exhaustion, unemployment and collapsing social confidence. Kashmir today represents that convergence.

Decades of conflict have not only left visible political scars but also invisible psychological ones. A generation raised amid uncertainty, shutdowns, violence, militarisation and disrupted education has grown up carrying accumulated stress and emotional insecurity. While conflict alone cannot explain addiction, it has undoubtedly shaped the social environment in which vulnerability deepened.

The irony of Kashmir’s drug crisis lies in its history. When militancy erupted in 1989, armed groups informally enforced bans on liquor shops, cinema halls and several forms of public entertainment as part of the Islamisation of public space during the insurgency years. Even after militancy declined, the social stigma around alcohol largely survived.

Yet, three decades later, the Valley is battling heroin addiction on a scale unimaginable in the 1990s.

That contradiction reveals an uncomfortable truth: conservative social structures alone cannot protect societies from narcotics epidemics. Addiction often grows not in permissive environments, but in psychologically strained ones.

The political debate around the liquor ban now reflects these wider anxieties. In Kashmir, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s demand for prohibition is as much about moral signalling and political positioning as it is about public health. The right-wing party understands that in a Muslim-majority society with deep cultural conservatism, the language of prohibition resonates strongly with public fears around social breakdown.

But comparisons with Gujarat and Bihar also complicate the debate. Both states enforce prohibition or tight alcohol restrictions, yet neither has escaped illicit trade, substance abuse or underground narcotics networks. Kashmir’s heroin crisis itself expanded despite decades of social hostility towards alcohol.

The deeper issue, therefore, is not simply the availability of liquor. It is the slow erosion of emotional resilience within a conflict-scarred society.

At the same time, the recent “Nasha Mukt J&K” campaign has achieved something significant by bringing addiction out of silence and into mainstream public discussion. In conflict societies, acknowledgement itself can become an important first step. But visibility alone cannot substitute structural reform.

Public mobilisation must eventually translate into rehabilitation systems, school counselling, mental health outreach and employment-linked interventions.

Kashmir’s addiction crisis should not be viewed merely through policing statistics or morality campaigns. It is fundamentally a story about social fatigue. That is perhaps the larger warning the Valley now offers for the rest of India: societies do not become vulnerable to addiction only when laws weaken. They become vulnerable when hope weakens.

ASIMA HASSAN

(The writer is a sociologist who studied conflict and its impact on youths. She is now the chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee, J&K)