- Documenting the horrible abyss of getting high
You see them. You see them on the roads, moving around in tattered clothes and unwashed faces. You see them in the markets asking desperately for a few rupees. You see them loitering around aimlessly with empty, deep eyes. Some of you may even have spared them some cash. Others leave them an angry stare, at times coupled with abuse. Many of you believe that these beings are unlike anything you are or will ever become. They are more of something rather than someone. Meet, dearest sirs and ma’ams, the blighted creatures referred to as charsi, powderi, jehaz and nashaye worthy of hate and derision.
Every Sunday, the newspapers are inundated with advertisements of various rehabilitation centres. These centres ‘guarantee’ that after a treatment, ranging from couple of days to couple of months, the addict will be cured and will quit for good. However, for many it turns out to be an empty promise. Many studies have found that the relapses are the norm rather than an exception. And of all addicts the relapse rate among heroin users is highest, some studies put it as higher as 90 percent.
Many of these rehabilitation centres are located in houses, mostly in suburban areas around big cities. The ‘packages’ they offer may range from anything between 500-1,000 per day to 10,000 per day, depending on the paying capacity of the patients’ custodians. Facilities like separate room, better food and best care are reserved for those select few who hail from well off families. For those from the rabble, the rehabilitation centres are not even a notch better than a jail.
I opted psychology during my bachelors and like many the chapters covering psychopathology caught my interest. From mild phobias to debilitating schizophrenia, the other side of sanity seems like a fantasy-land without escape. However, when I visited a couple of rehabilitation centres located in and around Islamabad I was surprised to find out that majority of the patients brought there didn’t suffer from psychiatric ailments. Most of the patients were heroin and charas addicts who were committed to these rehabilitation centres against their will.
The last time government released a survey report documenting the drug use in Pakistan was more than four years ago in 2013; it puts the number of heroin addicts alone at around three million. While, according to various independent surveys of local and international NGOs, a whopping 5 to 9 million individuals use various drugs in Pakistan.
A huge number of drug addicts fall into the category of ‘repeat clients’, as they’ve been to rehabs multiple times. There are individuals who have undergone multiple treatments and once freed from the controlled environment reverted back to drugs. The relapse rate of heroin addicts, according to a study conducted by Ayub Medical College few years back with a sample size of 100 heroin addicts, is more than 77 per cent.
In the absence of political will, many of these rehabilitation centres take full benefit of poor governmental regulations, lack of checks and balances by concerned governmental bodies, and a near absence of rehabilitation facilities at government hospitals. The state has outsourced the most vulnerable segment of society to the money minting machines in entirety.
Many believe that the roots of the present day drug epidemic can be traced back to early 1980s during the Afghan war. The number of heroin addicts skyrocketed during that era. And since there is no running away from geography, being the immediate neighbour of Afghanistan — the largest producer of heroin in the world — came with a price we pay dearly and even continue till this day.
We can pin down the reasons why an individual becomes a drug addict to countless factors ranging from breakdown of societal norms, bad company, easy availability of drugs, curiosity, urge to experiment to need for momentary solace through substance abuse. What we often miss out is the psychological toll it exacts on lives of family of addicts. Every now and then, the newspapers carry stories about bodies of drug addicts found in the streams that are taken to Edhi centres afterwards. The families of missing addicts throng these centres looking for their loved ones. If it is their son, the search ends. If it is someone else’s, their wait continues.
One might get the idea that it is only the frustrated and the downtrodden that fall in the abyss of drug addiction. No doubt, a majority of the heroin addicts hails from lower strata of societies but folks from so-called respectable classes too become victims of the vicious cycle of drug use and rehabilitation. For the sake of contrast, keep in mind that a heroin addict can get his fix for a hundred rupees while a lad hooked on ‘chitta’ has to spend ten thousand rupees for a single gram of cocaine.
This is the state of affairs in Republic of Narcotics-tan, dearest sirs and ma’ams. The dwellers aim to get high on any supply. Who is responsible? Who is the victim? Who is the beneficiary? I think we already know the answer. We just don’t want to realise it.
