The child is father of man. How true that statement is! After all, it is the ingrained family values, proper upbringing and environmental factors influencing a child that determine how the child develops as an individual in society.
Good practices contribute to a wholesome personality while rotten values result in delinquency.
One of the major problems afflicting us is the deterioration in values due to unhealthy and abhorrent cultural influences in this globalised world. Addiction to drugs and psychotropic substances is one such influence looming large and posing a challenge to all of us.
The United Nations (UN), realising the international ramifications of the drug trade, has been creating awareness globally while ensuring that member States attend to this problem on a war footing to eradicate the menace.
The International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is a United Nations International Day against drug abuse and illegal drug trade. It has been held annually since 1988 on June 26, a date chosen to commemorate Lin Zexu’s dismantling of the opium trade in Humen, Guangdong, just before the first opium war in China.
The observance was instituted by the General Assembly Resolution on December 7, 1987 and since then every year, June 26 is observed as Anti Drug Day all over the world.
Teenage is an impressionable age when the child comes to terms with physiological and biological changes within him/her. That is the age when the whole world opens up for them and external influences play a role. There is a sense of newfound independence resulting in an urge to experience all that comes their way. That is how children fall prey to cigarette smoking followed by liquor and drugs.
Peer pressure plays a role in entangling the youth in such dangerous habits.
First they are lured into the habit with an idea of just trying it for fun. Some bullies in school or college who are already addicts will claim that it is a “macho trait’” to smoke and drink!
Some impressionable kids get influenced by the wrong propaganda that the use of drugs improves memory power.
Petty peddlers of drugs hover around schools and colleges to cleverly induce the unsuspecting youth by mixing drugs with chocolates or ice cream. Some even give it free to lure youngsters. Once the habit is set, they harvest their pound of flesh.
It is painful to see some coffee vending restaurants with a hookah smoking facility where young boys and girls freely indulge in this pernicious habit. It starts with tobacco smoking and once the addiction is set, the body demands more addictive doses and the individual progresses to smoking heroin, ganja and cocaine. This pushes the individual to abysmal depths of addiction from which recovery is extremely difficult.
A message of hope given by the UN on Anti Drug Day is “Drug use disorders are preventable and treatable.” The focus should be on preventing people from falling prey to drug abuse, for which a concerted effort is required to create awareness.
Dangerous Drugs Act and Opium Act, which were the main laws to prevent movement of narcotics, were amended and a new act called the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Prevention Act came into force in 1985 making the punishment more stringent.
Unfortunately our geographical proximity to the world’s largest producers of heroin and hashish, namely Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, called the Golden Crescent, renders India’s borders vulnerable to drug trafficking. Our country is a transit route for illicit drug trafficking. In the process, India has become a consumer of narcotics and hallucinatory drugs, primarily the youth.
The pub culture in cities has spread like an uncontrollable virus with the youth considering it cool to hang out there. They gradually fall prey to the abuse of ganja, ketamine cocaine and methamphetamine, popularly known as ecstasy.
Experts and social scientists said that there was a need for science-based discussion on reducing the harm caused by drug abuse. Law enforcement agencies like the police and the Narcotics Special Wing have to take intense measures to put an end to trafficking.
To create awareness among the youth, anti-drug clubs can be formed in schools and colleges, not only to educate people but also to help wean away those trapped in addiction.
There is an urgent need to instil a sense of pride among the youth, so they can claim proudly that they are clean and that refusing drugs is every individual’s right.
It is time for all of us to join hands and say NO to drugs unitedly.