Human Face of Addiction in Kashmir

In a cramped ward of a de-addiction centre in Srinagar, a young man, call him Omar, a composite of many real stories, traces the grain of the wooden bed with his fingertip and admits, in a voice almost too small for the room, that he can’t remember who he was before the needle. He remembers a school uniform, a scholarship question paper, a sister who laughed too loud. He remembers a winter when everything felt heavy and someone offered him a way to feel lighter. That light became a trap.

Kashmir’s heroin crisis is not a single thing you can point to on a map. It is thousands of private collapses stitched together: families who whisper about shame, neighbourhoods where young men vanish for days, hospitals that become revolving doors. Official and investigative reports make the scale hard to ignore, a parliamentary panel and multiple surveys put the number of people wrestling with substance abuse in Jammu & Kashmir in the hundreds of thousands, with estimates frequently cited around 13.5 lakh individuals and a worrying number of minors among them.

Why heroin? The drug’s presence in the Valley is partly geographic. Kashmir sits not far from historical trafficking routes but geography alone is a poor explanation for why so many young people choose to plug themselves into oblivion. Local psychiatrists and recent reporting show a brutal shift: where medicinal opioids or cannabis once predominated, intravenous heroin has surged, bringing with it more violent addiction, higher relapse rates, and a rise in blood-borne infections. Clinics in Srinagar report daily hundreds of new and returning cases, and clinicians have warned of a rapid and “exponential” increase in substance use in recent years.

You cannot read those dry numbers without seeing the injuries behind them. Decades of conflict have left a psychological residue: a generation raised beneath curfews, military gates, and a social life narrowed by suspicion. Add to that high youth unemployment and the collapse of predictable futures, and you get a pressure cooker in which heroin can feel like an answer or a way to quiet fear, pain, anger, and the constant hum of uncertainty. Journalists and clinicians who work inside Kashmir describe addiction as both a symptom and a coping mechanism: not moral failure, but an emergency response to unbearable circumstances.

The medical fallout has been severe and visible. Reports from local mental-health institutes note a terrifying convergence of heroin addiction and infectious disease: hepatitis C and other blood-borne viruses have trended upwards among people who inject drugs, and withdrawal is both physically brutal and psychologically crippling. Local doctors estimate alarmingly high rates of infection among their patient population, a consequence of shared needles and lack of sustained treatment infrastructure.

If the problem is large, the system made to treat it is small. Kashmir has relatively few full-time, long-term rehabilitation beds; many districts have only outpatient treatment centres and scant counselling staff. Families who want help often face two enemies: stigma and scarcity. The result is that a person who seeks help today may be back on the street tomorrow, because the social supports, job training, and long-term counselling that prevent relapse are limited or absent.

Dr. Fazl-e-Roub — a practising addiction psychiatrist who treats patients in Anantnag and Srinagar has described what clinicians see every day: dozens, sometimes more than a hundred young people arriving at clinics for help, most of them already deeply dependent on heroin. What that number hides is the churn, the same faces returning after brief detoxes, the families that try everything and then run out of options and the sense among doctors that demand for long-term, evidence-based care far outstrips supply.

The clinical consequences are brutal and specific. Several studies and hospital surveys from the Valley show shockingly high rates of hepatitis C and other blood-borne infections among people who inject drugs, a direct consequence of shared needles and inadequate harm-reduction services; these infections are not a side note but part of the cycle that keeps people unwell and stuck. Treating hepatitis C at scale, and breaking the reuse-of-needles economy, would reduce immediate mortality and also give recovering people a reason to believe that recovery is medically possible.

We already know what works elsewhere: medication-assisted treatment (buprenorphine, methadone, naltrexone) combined with counselling dramatically lowers overdose, cravings, and relapse; syringe-exchange and other harm-reduction measures cut HIV/HCV transmission and open a pathway back to care.India’s harm-reduction literature and global evidence makes this clear, but the Valley currently lacks the scale of MAT programmes and syringe services it needs. Without expanding these pragmatic interventions, every round of political attention and every short detox will simply be a brief reprieve.

That gap is exactly where community actors have begun to matter. Local NGOs and harm-reduction groups are doing grassroots outreach, while state initiatives such as the Nasha Mukt campaigns and district-level Addiction Treatment Facility Centres try to plug holes; recently, doctors at Srinagar clinics also enlisted imams and mosque committees to push prevention and de-stigmatise care. Those partnerships clinical, civic, and religious are small, messy, and real but they are also where trust can be rebuilt if they are supported rather than sidelined.

There are fragile successes to point to: women who chose recovery and now run peer groups; ex-users who do outreach in markets and get someone into a clinic before the next overdose; neighbourhood mosques that quietly host counselling sessions. These are not dramatic victories in the national press, but they show the shape of a realistic response, one that starts with people and workplaces and kitchens rather than headlines. The difference between a Valley that keeps losing a son every month and one that keeps one more is usually built by these small, sustained acts.

And yet, between the statistics and the despair, there are small, stubborn acts of repair. Clinics and NGOs and, increasingly, local religious leaders and community elders who have begun to build a different response. Doctors in Srinagar have recently met with imams to enlist mosques in awareness and recovery efforts; small groups of recovered addicts now do outreach in neighbourhoods, teaching safer practices and offering a route back to the family. These efforts do not erase the scale of the crisis, but they change the atmosphere of it: addiction stops being only shame and becomes, sometimes, a shared problem that people can say aloud and try to solve.

What does “healing” look like here? It is not one speech or one policy. It is a layered, practical thing: sustained funding for evidence-based treatment; more counsellors who can stay with a young person longer than a single detox; job programs that replace the emptiness of idleness with the dignity of work; schools that teach emotional literacy as fiercely as math; and communities that stop treating addiction as an eternal moral stain. It is also, crucially, listening to the young men and women who say, in private, that they were trying to forget pain they had no language for.

What policy should look like is painfully ordinary: scale up MAT and needle-exchange services; fund long-term psychosocial programmes (job training, housing, family therapy) that reduce relapse; run school-based emotional-literacy and life-skills programmes; make hepatitis-C testing and direct-acting antiviral treatment available at the same clinics that do detox; and measure outcomes openly so money goes where it helps. The Parliamentary Standing Committee’s estimate of the scale of the problem and global guidance from bodies like the UNODC mean that this is not just a local public-health issue but one that requires predictable budgets and honest measurement.

My take: and I’ll say this without hedging: healing in Kashmir will never arrive if we treat addiction as a policing problem or a shame to hide. Healing is political and logistical and moral work at once: it asks governments to budget, teachers to teach feelings as skill, imams and priests to preach medicine as well as morality, and neighbours to stop branding a child a failure. If we treat recovery as an act of civic repair or a way of saying to the Valley’s youth that their lives still matter enough to be rebuilt, then the battle against heroin becomes not a victory for a policy paper but a series of small human returns: a father allowed to sit with his son again, a sister able to sleep without fear, a young worker given a wage and a future.

If Kashmir’s present is marked by visible conflict, its coming will be decided in quieter rooms: clinics, classrooms, and kitchens. The battle against heroin will be less about raids and more about remaking possibility for a generation that has been taught to expect little. Healing, in that sense, is a form of resistance, a refusal to let the Valley’s youth be defined by loss.

Author studies psychology