The lands are dry and the kids are highIT WAS the lying that proved hardest for Pradeep, a 30-year-old man who has spent the past two years getting off heroin. Whenever he had to leave his family’s house to score, or to nod off somewhere, he had to invent a story. Money was another problem: spending 5,000 rupees ($75) for his daily fix led him to rock bottom due to, as he says in delicate English, “financial disturbance”. He was a shop clerk for 15 years, but after just four months on the needle his savings were gone.
Today Pradeep looks healthy, with a clear gaze and only faint scars on the backs of his hands. Similarly, Maqboolpura, an area of the city of Amritsar shamed in the national press as a den of addicts and widows, appears tranquil: its brick-lined lanes are tidy, with a few cows lowing and no junkies staggering through the dark. But Punjab is suffering from a hidden epidemic of drug abuse. A recent study found that nearly 20% of the state’s young men use opioids—and not just the traditional poppy husks. P.D. Garg, a psychiatrist who has been treating Punjab’s drug addicts for years, says that injectable...Continue reading
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