Punjab reported 33,000 drug-related cases between 2022 & 2024, second only to Kerala. While a police crackdown is limited to choking the supply of drugs, the demand remains intact.
Amidst a deepening drug crisis, Punjab’s crackdown reveals a grim underbelly of unlicensed de-addiction centres exploiting desperate families and flouting regulations.
Assembly told that Sirsa, with 7,020 affected youths this year, has just 80 beds in 2 facilities. Panchkula’s 10-bed general hospital woefully insufficient for its 13,442 cases.
Haryana villagers have taken the fight against drugs into their own hands. Vigilante groups across the state are naming and shaming users and peddlers, but caste plays a part too.
Addiction treatment centres across India are observing an uptick in patients grappling with abuse of opium-derived painkillers like Tramadol, specialists say.
French biotech firm developed & tested drug which blocks human body’s cannabinoid receptor pathway that causes addiction, according to report in Nature Medicine journal.
Residents of Jallupur Khera village said Amritpal's influence extended only to the youth, and elderly members of the village had long since distanced themselves from his talks of Khalistan.
Chasing the next high is the only thing that ‘makes life worth living’ for many of Delhi’s street children, some as young as 8. Most don’t want to be ‘rescued'.
Fenced off with barbed wire and guarded by pitbulls, many drug rehabs are more like prisons than hospitals. Breaking the rules could mean sleep deprivation, stripping, assault.
The recent resignations of its seniormost judges are among the most pointed institutional protests Pakistan has witnessed since the lawyers’ movement of the late 2000s.
Without a Congress revival, there can be no challenge to the BJP pan-nationally. Modi’s party is growing, and almost entirely at the cost of the Congress.
Udta Punjab is a headache for the entire nation.