How not to score drugs in a big city

Unlike a decade ago, you can no longer find classic joints tucked away in small, neglected neighbourhoods selling cocaine. Technology has made the trade and supply of expensive drugs such as cocaine and LSD far more organised and noiseless.

This is especially true for big metropolitan cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata. In these places, while cannabis is easily available in little makeshift shops or from well-known dealers who have been in the business for long, cocaine is only made available through a network of discreetly functioning dealers who have the drug measured, couriered home or personally handed over to clients at unlikely public locations like shopping malls.

All communication is carried out only through personal cellphones and it is hence almost impossible for one to get cocaine in the city without being acquainted with a regular user who knows the network.

It’s no longer passed on in rave parties or nightclubs, as it used to be.

This is the technique that was seen in the recent case of busted cocaine that was being couriered to the CEO of a leading e-publishing firm in Chennai. And such sophistication in trade poses the police as well as rehabilitation centres like ours a big challenge to buck up and make crackdowns more intelligent and efficient.

What’s typical with cocaine is that because it’s a costlier substance than say, brown sugar or magic mushrooms, suppliers cater to well-to-do-sections of IT employees, film personalities, college students and businessmen.

In most states, it is sold at Rs 3,500 to 4,000 per gram. It is snorted or injected and leaves the user vulnerable to addiction even after the first few times. And not to mention that it leads to serious cardio arrests and overdose deaths.

There is a trend with quitters starting their own rehabilitation centres, which many times backfires badly. Many of them are barely two to three years into withdrawal and not fit to offer the complex medical, psychiatric regimen that long-time addicts need. But they go on to become counsellors themselves. And then there are search engines like Justdial that post details about these clinics without checking how credible they are.

We have had so many enquiries from families asking us if we would tie up patients or beat them; this is the perception they get from popular media and their own negative experiences at unregulated centres. The government has not taken up any initiative to form eligibility guidelines for treatment and rehabilitation centres to be set up.

The most urgent need of the hour is education and awareness in schools for children at a young age, and bringing to their notice case studies of people who have succumbed to as well as recovered from substance abuse, the extent of damage it causes and how it can be avoided in totality.

Among existent users, we need families to educated on addiction, which is a bio behavioural disorder and needs long-term intervention and care. We have seen families who discontinue treatment midway and take their wards to spiritual camps and Yoga classes, which is highly detrimental and never the solution, when done independent of professional help.

On the part of law and order, we need more resource centres with 24/7 helplines that are always accessible, where a drug abuser can be taken to first, instead of being locked up in jail.

Finally, 60 per cent of HIV+ patients in India are chemically dependent on drug use.

This shows that substance abuse as an issue cannot be looked at independently. A city’s crime rate, sexual abuse rate and HIV cases; these are all connected to its ratio of serious drug abusers, who are mostly people leading normal lives with day jobs and families and no past records to look up.

As a result, they are very hard to trace. Having said that, our own taboo towards substance abusers, lack of credible professional treatment centres and the stigma attached to addiction – discourages abusers to come out and seek help. Though it must be mentioned that there has been a visible increase in the number of people coming out, as compared to about ten years ago.

(As told to Saranya Chakrapani)