Opioid addiction is ravaging Kashmir’s young

In December, a senior Kashmiri doctor tweeted a disturbing picture of a young man undergoing treatment at a hospital in Srinagar for drug addiction.

The patient’s arm had developed gangrene after he inadvertently injected drugs into his artery. With the body tissue in his right arm and hand dead, the undergraduate student of science was disabled for life, said Dr Muhammad Salim Khan.

Khan shares such disturbing images often. His aim, he said, is to bring to light “the extent of the substance abuse problem we are facing”. “As a society, we can’t afford to be in denial any longer,” Dr Khan told Scroll.

Over the last few years, drug abuse has rapidly emerged as a frightening crisis affecting the young in the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

Even political parties are taking note. On June 16, Jammu and Kashmir’s oldest mainstream political party, the National Conference, constituted an 11-member committee in order to look into substance abuse in the Union territory.

The numbers

In a reply in the Lok Sabha to a question regarding drug addiction in the country, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in March said nearly 10 lakh people in the Union territory were into substance abuse. More than half of these...

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