The drug menace has spread its tentacles all over the country. Involvement of international drug cartels, especially South American cartels regulating the cocaine trade have led to the situation turning grim.
These cartels often have nexus with local drug lords, gangsters, and Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) located in various countries.
Terrorism and other disruptive active darknet markets are financed by the illicit money generated from the narcotics trade. Traditional drug markets have been disrupted by the proliferation of darknet markets, hamstringing tracking and intercepting drug shipments.
Main reason for addiction
If you have issues pertaining to low confidence and low self –esteem, escapism through drugs, tobacco or alcohol becomes an easy option. Consuming these substances makes you feel more confident and self-assured in any social situation. The problem happens when this habit becomes a frailty, leading to such a situation in which you get restless without consuming it whether it is cigarettes, alcohol or drugs to perform or behave yourself as you would like to.
Measures taken to curb the menace
The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has been executing the scheme of prevention of alcoholism and substance abuse through the National Action Plan on Drug Demand Reduction. It furnishes a plethora of services, counselling, including awareness programme, treatment and rehabilitation of addicts. The programme accentuates a community-based prevention approach through educational programmes and services for drug addicted persons and their caretakers.
The imperative need is to strategize how vulnerable minds should be sensitised (having due regard for the age and stage of the child) to the threats of drug abuse, the requirement to report drug use and the need to build resistance to prevailing peer and social pressures.
An exhaustive prevention and control programmes is required in schools and the community, orientated towards school and college students, teachers and family. The Approach
The Ministry has furnished a National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction (NAPDDR) for 2018-2024 along the lines of the United Nations Conventions and the existing Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985, and NDPS Policy, 2012. NAPDDR emphasises identification, counselling, preventive education, awareness generation, treatment and rehabilitation of drug addicted persons and training and skills developing of the service providers through collaborative efforts of the Central and State Governments and Non-Governmental Organizations.
The National Institute of Social Defence (NISD), an autonomous body of MSJ&E, is responsible for executing the activities of NAPDDR. To organise awareness creation and sensitisation programmes, and to impart orientation and capacity building trainings to various target groups is one of the core activities of NISD under NAPDDR. These incorporate officials of prisons, police, students and teachers of schools and colleges, correctional institutions and child protection institutions, PRIs, NYKs and NSS, etc., to strategise effective intervention patterns and worked out strategies for tackling the issues of substance abuse and effectuating qualitative improvements in service accomplishment . The aforesaid endeavours , therefore, is accomplishing the following aims of NAPDDR:
1. Nurture human resources and enhance their ability for working towards these aims.
2. Facilitate training, documentation, research, innovation and collection of relevant information to bolster the objectives.
3. Build awareness and inform people about the noxious impacts of drug abuse on the individual, the family, workplace and the society at large and dilute stigmatisation of and discrimination against groups and individuals addicted with drugs to mainstream them back into the society.
4. Furnish comprehensive community-based services for the motivation, counselling, identification, de-addiction, aftercare and rehabilitation for the Whole Person convalescence (WPC) of addicts.
The programmes will be executed through collaborative endeavours of other training Institutions, NGOs, Central Ministries, State Governments, Universities and other voluntary agencies.
The following have been brought under the NAPDDR:
1. Delegates of paramilitary forces, judicial officers, PRIs and ULBs, police functionaries, bar council etc. on drug abuse prevention.
2. Students of Schools and colleges
3. Teachers, counsellors and teaching faculty of school and colleges
4. Officials of IRCAs and professionals in drug prevention sector etc.
5. Service performers, both in Government, Semi-Government and Non-Government sectors
6. Officials in Prisons and Juvenile Homes and ICPS functionaries.
Conclusion:
The colossal extent of drug addiction at a massive magnitude is alarming for the entire country. The drugs are ubiquitous in market A few reasons for high drug consumption in India are unemployment, social tensions, easy availability of narcotics, sale of prescription drugs at chemist shops. We need individual, societal and government support to overcome this problem and address this issue on a war footing.
[Dr. Ravi Prakash Tiwari is the author of Pun is Fun.]
