Drug Menace in Kashmir: A War We Cannot Afford to Lose

✒️:. Mohd Rafique Rather

The recent report by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment should awaken every conscience in Jammu and Kashmir. As per the report over one million people in the Union Territory are affected by drug abuse. This grim figure demands more than routine rhetoric. If militancy consumed a generation, drugs now threaten to devour the next. This is not a private tragedy, it is a social emergency.

In a rare political intervention, three senior PDP leaders Iqbal Tramboo, Arif Laigaroo, and Zuhaib Yousuf Mir, met the Director General of Police in Srinagar to press the point. Their effort deserves appreciation. It broke a dangerous silence and pushed the crisis into mainstream political discourse.

The drug ecosystem that sustains supply, trafficking, and profit must be dismantled—not through extrajudicial means, but through relentless, lawful action. Law enforcement agencies must coordinate, trace money trails, target kingpins, and move cases quickly. Arrests must not end in routine releases on technicalities. If bail provisions are being misused, the law must be applied more robustly, trials fast-tracked, and legal reforms advanced so the powerful cannot exploit loopholes.Yet enforcement alone is not enough. Addiction is also a health and social crisis. Kashmir urgently needs large-scale rehabilitation infrastructure, psychological support, and community-based programmes that offer recovery. Schools, colleges, religious institutions, and civil society must step forward to provide early intervention, counselling, and pathways back to education and work.

The administration’s response so far has been patchy and inadequate. There is no clear statewide de-addiction policy, rehabilitation capacity is limited, and preventive work remains sporadic. With a million lives at stake, bureaucratic and political inaction borders on moral failure. The government must immediately publish a coherent action plan with targets for rehabilitation beds, funds for mental health professionals, continuous awareness campaigns, and a transparent monitoring mechanism that reports progress publicly.We must also address root causes—unemployment, alienation, trauma, and lack of opportunity. Without jobs, education, and recreation to restore hope, policing will treat only the symptoms while the disease spreads.

The PDP’s intervention has sounded the alarm. Now, every stakeholder, political parties, administrators, police, teachers, religious leaders, health professionals, families, and communities must respond with clarity and unity, just as we confronted militancy.If militancy stole our past, drugs threaten our future. We owe it to our youth to act with law, compassion, and urgency. Anything less would be surrender and that surrender could destroy our society.

The author is a trade union leader turned politician, educationist, writer, and TV debater. Can be reached at mrafiqr65@gmail.com

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