CHENNAI:Some three or four decades ago, even the well-heeled of the junkies in Chennai would not have dreamt of sniffing cocaine, the drug that Kollywood glamourised by showing its bad boys getting high on it prior to rapacious adventures. For cocaine, or ‘coke’, or ‘snow’ or whatever it was called in those English movies was not available in the city even when ‘smack’ or ‘brown sugar’ was freely ‘chased’ in dim-lit college hostel rooms. Brown sugar, a crude form of heroin, entered Chennai in the 1980s as the city was then a transit point for big drug cartels that was making smuggling it to western nations. A part of the stuff found its way into the dark alleys and landed in the hands of shadowy figures, earlier peddling ‘grass’ to a wide range of citizens, including college students. Thus, smack got to be ‘chased’ (a method of inhaling the fumes of the highly addictive drug kept on an aluminium foil and heated with a lighted match stick) easily, despite being expensive and out of reach for many doing marijuana. Cocaine, but then, belonged to another continent.
Later, as brown sugar wreaked havoc in many young lives and NGOs, and colleges upped their ante on the campaign against drugs, the subsequent generation of students started shunning drugs, which made its way into slums with even ragpickers and urchins falling prey to its lure. Even many of those kids were weaned away as the city observed International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking every June 26, unrelenting its war against drug abuse. But now with Colombians themselves landing in Chennai with loads of cocaine, a ‘crack’ is showing in the wall that the campaigns had seemingly raised. And you see the elite sniffing and yuppie turning junkie. Yes, cocaine is more frightening.