Drug menace spreading tentacles in Kangra areas

Ravinder Sood

Palampur, July 16

Even as law-enforcing agencies are making efforts to tighten noose on drug traffickers, the menace of drugs is spreading its tentacles in the Palampur and Baijnath areas of Kangra district.

Anti-social elements are luring adolescents and unemployed youths with different types of intoxicants to establish their nexus.

There are many points in Palampur, Baijnath, Jaisinghpur, Bhawarna and Maranda, where drugs are easily available to youths. In Baijnath alone, over one-dozen cases have been registered and a number of youths arrested over the past past two months in connection with the drug trade.

In the rural areas of Palampur, Jaisinghpur and Baijnath, many village youths are addicted to drugs. A few have been bed-ridden after drug overdose.

An elderly man said his son was running a small shop in the village when a peddler provided him ‘chitta’ six months ago.

After he got addicted to drugs, he was not in a proper mental state and was unable to move. He died by suicide a few months ago.

Doctors in local Civil Hospital admitted that many youths coming to OPD were hooked to drugs.

As the district lacks a de-addiction centre, they are asked to go to such facilities outside the state.

In the past one year, the police have arrested several persons, including women, involved in this illegal trade. Even as several cases under the Narcotics Act have been registered in different police stations, there is not let up in the menace of drug trafficking.

People feel that many towns and villages, particularly on the Punjab border, have been threatened by the inflow of drugs and cheap intoxicants from neighbouring states. The drug traffickers lure unemployed youths, rural population and schoolchildren to become ‘carriers’.

“Before the problem of alcoholism and drug abuse takes roots as a social malaise in Palampur, the state that is empowered under Article 47 of the Constitution, should initiate necessary steps to build a climate of abstinence by disseminating information about ill-effects of alcohol and other intoxicants,” said a retired police officer.