Two youth recently caught in Chennai with 8 kg marijuana — Arvind (21), an engineering student, and Sidharth (19), pursuing BCom through distance education — told the police that they had gone all the way to Usilampatti in Madurai district to procure the ‘stuff’ because they were finding it difficult to get pure ganja in the city.
Implicit in the confession is the fact that the ‘joint’ — part of student culture between the 1960s and late 1980s, which slowly faded away in subsequent decades — is back with a bang.
One reason why the student community started shunning drugs in the past was that it saw many young lives lost in the altar of the pot during the mid-1980s when experimentation on stronger, more addictive and quickly devastating stuff like ‘brown sugar’ began on the campuses across Chennai, where ganja usage was an open secret.
A chastened young generation chose abstinence – it was also an era that marked the beginning of economic liberalization that was opening up job prospects in the information technology sector — and drugs went to the slums.
However, the sellers remained the same. All that they did was cater to a different clientele that was perhaps okay with sachets of adulterated weed - mixing ganja with dry horse dung (it looks almost like dry ganja leaves) and a pesticide gives an additional high.
Decades later, Aravind and Sidharth, in the pursuit of purity learnt that it can be procured in Usilampatti, as ganja is grown in the hill ranges of Theni. That they heard stories of veteran pot smokers waxing eloquent on the efficacy of pure weed, which prompted them check out the Usilampatti market, is an indication that the joint is back as part of youth culture.
The two friends visited Usilampatti about two months ago and returned to Chennai with 1 kg of ganja, bought for `7,500. With peers rushing to have a share of top quality grass, they exhausted their stock in no time and found themselves richer, having dispensed with it at a rate of `1,000 per 50 gram.
In their first trip they contacted some locals on reaching Usilampatti and were taken to a man, who had a godown about a km away from the bus stand. On their second trip, they met the same man and returned with 4 kg of the psychedelic stuff. Luck got smoked out during the third attempt when nosey policemen inspected their vehicle on the road along the Marina.
The duo confessed to the police that they were looking for better quality weed, which led to them to the trade. “Supply was just a phone call away and replenishment done at any time during day or night. However, the buyer had to provide a proper reference after which he would be asked to meet them at a particular place and time to collect the stuff for a fixed price,” an officer investigating the case told Express.
“There was another restriction. They chose not to sell to anyone outside the student community to keep their network intact and stay under the police radar,” he said.
Outside of this now-busted network, marijuana is available in little sachets (potlum in local parlance) for `70 and `130 at some of the slums and seedy corners in the city. Though people from different walks of life patronise the peddlers, the number of college students visiting them has gone up rather alarmingly, according to a senior police official.