Hyderabad: This June 26 arrives with an unusual convergence. The International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking falls this year on the same date as Muharram, which marks the beginning of the Islamic New Year, a time associated with both mourning and renewal. For those working on drug prevention in Hyderabad, the overlap feels fitting. The occasion asks for the same thing: let go of what is destroying you and begin again. It will not happen overnight. But beginnings need a date.
The Telangana government has some reason for quiet satisfaction. Stricter enforcement over the past two years has visibly rattled drug trafficking networks, with peddlers and their supply chains feeling the pressure. But enforcement, as experts here are quick to point out, addresses only one layer of a problem whose roots run considerably deeper.
Problem with family, falling apart
Dr C Veerender, a counselling psychologist in Hyderabad, told Siasat.com that parents are directly responsible for drug addiction among their children, not as a moral charge, but as a clinical finding about what happens when parenting happens without awareness.
The first six years of a child’s life – what he calls the “golden age” – establish the emotional foundations that will either buffer or expose a child to addictive behaviour. Parental attitudes and actions during this window are formative in ways most parents do not appreciate, he said.
Compounding this is a demographic reality, which is that the age at which children enter adolescence has been falling, which means the window of vulnerability is opening earlier.
“With access to the internet and social media, children can find enormous information on what drugs are available,” Dr Veerender told Saisat.com. “They are left with two options – excitement or a mellowed feeling. At that point, they connect with a person who can provide it. Initially, they feel that their problems can be resolved through drugs. But as they progress, it stops being a solution and starts controlling them.”
Bullying by peers, and sometimes teachers, is another driver, he said. Students pushed into self-imposed isolation develop a particular reading of the world, that everyone is hostile, that something must be done to deal with that reality and that drugs offer an answer. A wrong one, but an available one.
What addiction actually does
The neuroscience is not complicated. Dr Veerender explained that any mind-altering substance directly impacts the prefrontal cortex, which is the front portion of the brain’s frontal lobe that governs decision-making. “The neuron network in that part of the brain becomes poor,” he said, “while a new network forms that keeps pulling the person back to the substance.” That, in clinical terms, is how addiction takes hold and holds on.
He acknowledged the state government’s efforts. But he was equally clear that enforcement alone leaves the problem largely intact. The roots remain untouched.
What actually needs to happen
What Dr Veerender called for is not a marathon or a banner or a press conference. It is something more structural and considerably less glamorous.
The real stakeholders in this effort, as he sees it, are parents, children, teachers and lecturers, police and a government policy that actually funds mental health. Each of these groups needs to be engaged, not as an audience for awareness campaigns, but as active participants with specific roles.
Parents need to be taught how to parent. Teachers and lecturers need to be trained in recognising a child in distress. Police cannot function only as enforcers as they are part of the social fabric that either catches or misses early warning signs. And parents-teachers meetings, currently dominated by discussions of marks and attendance, need to become spaces where adults are equipped to spot the signs of addiction before it has taken hold.
“Just like COVID-19 symptoms were displayed in every school and college, a similar attempt should be made for drug abuse,” he said. “Put it on the walls. How do you identify if a child is addicted? That question should be in every classroom.”
He is also firm that stigma makes the problem worse. Labelling someone an addict, or branding them in any way, only pushes them further from help. His advice to those struggling is, “Accept the fact. Report it to your parents. Even if they scold you or beat you, it is fine. Seek medical help from a psychologist or psychiatrist, and a nutritionist.”
Underlying all of this is a funding problem. The Union Budget this year allocated Rs 1,000 crore for mental health, a figure that, for a country of 1.4 billion dealing with compounding pressures of urbanisation, family breakdown and digital overexposure, is less a commitment than a gesture. “Slogans may itch the brain,” Dr Veerender said, “but they cannot produce actionable results.”
A genuine multi-pronged approach involving civil society needs far more behind it than rhetoric.
Among the communities he sees affected in Hyderabad, he noted a marked increase in Muslims approaching him for counselling, often after situations have escalated well beyond what the family can manage on its own.
Substances that predate the law
On this day, it is worth pausing on a dimension of the drug debate that rarely surfaces in official messaging – the question of how certain substances came to be criminalised in the first place and what interests drove that process.
Alongside the enforcement-first approach, researchers and legal scholars have been paying growing attention to the trajectory that brought substances like ganja and opium under prohibition, and to the decisions made by several countries that have moved in the other direction, choosing instead to regulate and protect psychotropic substances that carry genuine medical, spiritual and religious significance.
Ganja and opium are indigenous to India and Central Asia, with recorded use stretching back to at least 2000 BC, and their significance in those traditions has not disappeared.
A research article published in the International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts, by Madhurima Sruti Sharma and Dr Leena Chabbra, traces the arc from British colonial policy to the post-Independence regime in India. Their argument is that the criminalisation of substances like ganja and opium was not purely a public health decision. Commercial interests played a significant role.
Ganja, a word derived from Sanskrit – associated with the plant that grew along the banks of the Ganga river – appears in the Atharva Veda as one of five sacred plants associated with bliss and the relief of tension. Opium, known in Urdu as afeem and cultivated in parts of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, was used in Ayurvedic and Unani medicine to treat pain, insomnia and digestive ailments.
The British commercialised opium aggressively in the 19th century, launching the Opium Monopoly System, whose reverberations played out in the opium wars between Britain and China. Within India, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report of 1894, the result of an extensive inquiry, concluded that moderate use of ganja was not particularly harmful and should not be prohibited.
For much of the British period, ganja was therefore legal and regulated. This was true in Hyderabad State as well, under Mir Osman Ali Khan, the seventh and last Nizam. Historical records indicate that ganja was not only legal but was offered to fakirs (beggars) and sadhus. Cultivation was permitted, produce was auctioned and use was regulated for its recognised medicinal and spiritual purposes.
That history has become an uncomfortable reference point for some. Certain commentators have sought to dismiss the Nizam’s era on this count, attributing some of his personal conduct, including alleged indulgence in prostitution, to the kind of excess that drug use facilitates. The same commentators are often found invoking the gazette issued by that very Nizam in 1934, which declared the Nallamala Forests a Chenchu reserve, protecting the rights of the Adivasi community still living there.
The willingness to reach selectively for a historical figure’s legacy, taking what suits the argument and discarding the rest, deserves to be named as what it is.
What the streets of Hyderabad actually look like
The historical debate is one thing. The present-day reality is another.
Hyderabad’s drug landscape has moved well beyond ganja, afeem, cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine, ecstasy pills or any single category. What young people are consuming now is often a combination, and what makes it far more dangerous is adulteration.
Ganja consignments arriving from parts of Odisha are reportedly sprayed with chemicals before loading to mask the smell. By the time they reach Hyderabad, a second round of spraying, this time with pesticides and other compounds, is administered. On the street, this adulterated product is known locally as “chita maal.”
Young people are then mixing this with alcohol and layering prescription drugs on top – medicines available over the counter to anyone who walks in, and, for those working in hospital settings, available for near nothing. The combinations are unpredictable. The consequences frequently are not.
None of this is new. For three decades, Hyderabad has watched people, including children, seek altered states through whatever is within reach – whitener, Erazex, petrol pressed to a cloth. Many have not survived the attempt. Those who have are finding other ways.
In the Old City, in particular, a drug known on the street as Termin, the brand name for Mephentermine Sulphate, a cardiac stimulant prescribed medically to treat low blood pressure, has found a parallel, unsanctioned market. There are other prescription drugs being misused for the high they produce.
Among them Spasmo Proxyvon and its allied medicines, a drug formulated to manage labour pains in the final stages of pregnancy, as well as Valium and Nitravet, which are nominally regulated but continue to slip through the gaps.
The human cost compounds quietly. People are not just losing their lives. Their children are growing up watching and imitating, in the manner that Dr Veerender’s clinical observations have repeatedly borne out.
Data that never comes
None of this is made easier by the opacity of the agencies tasked with combating it. Requests for information sent to TGNAB, H-NEW, and Telangana’s Eagle Force – seeking data on drug seizures, arrests and convictions – have received no response. What that silence says about institutional accountability, in a state that has made enforcement a point of public pride, is a question worth pressing.
The head of one of these agencies has continued in the role past the age of superannuation and has declined all media engagement. The name is being withheld here, but the refusal to answer is not.The Congress government in Telangana has built much of its public messaging around Praja Palana – governance in the public interest. In the days ahead, that promise deserves to be tested against facts rather than slogans.
The data is a reasonable place to start.
| Edited by Osama Salman | | 
