Devangshu Datta: Be liberal, fix the drug problem

VIEWPOINT

In that long-distant time when I was a teenager and petrol retailed at Rs 1.67 per litre, we held our evening addas in D N Mitra Square. DNMS lies halfway between Elgin Road and Jadu Babur Bazar, in the middle-class locality of Bhowanipur, Calcutta.

Most of my generation left town; there wasn't enough work available locally. Quite a few of our parents still live in Bhowanipur, though the ranks are thinning. Someday I will cease to subscribe to a Calcutta newspaper because I no longer need to scan the obits.

Family ties still keep us rooted to Bhowanipur and it's serendipitious if several members of the old gang happen to be in town at the same time. Many people have done well. My gang includes policemen, army officers, doctors, software engineers, architects, accountants, academics, designers and musicians.

Twenty-five years later, I am cherry-picking memories, of course. We grew up in the grim, gray era of power cuts. But I do remember the above blokes with some fondness. We had many entertaining conversations of an evening sitting on park benches as we passed around the ritual chillum.

DNMS is better-known as "Ganja Park", which is what the bus-stop is called. A nearby government shop sold ganja (the cannabis flower), opium (the tears of the poppy) and bhang (the cannabis leaf). It still sells opium though you need an addict's certificate to buy it now.

When the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Act came into force in 1986, my generation was in its mid-20s. We grew up with legal marijuana, bought from government shops and smoked openly. On festive occasions we drank Siddhi (the Bengali version of bhang). We checked out opiates, dropped blots and swallowed those over-the-counter drugs which contained codeine and meths.

Of course, several friends became drug-abuse statistics; even more have been pickled by alcohol. Most settled down to normal existence. Drugs were part of our learning curve and we dealt with them as well or badly as Indians had for millennia.

Our younger siblings got it in the neck. They grew up post-NDPA and went through far more pain. They got mugged buying from criminals, OD-ed on smack adulterated with rat poison (as Bibek Moitra may have done), some got busted and ended up in jail.

Drugs of various kinds continue to be freely available""they have just become more expensive and the mix has changed. Post-NPDA dealers have focused on supplying heroin, ecstasy and coke because these are high-margin, low-volume commodities.

In 1986, India expanded the market for high-risk drugs by banning all N&P drugs. Since then, drug-related crime has shot up and the ancillary corruption of law-enforcement agencies increased. The AIDS epidemic in the north-east is clearly linked to addicts sharing needles. The government persists in believing that anti-drug awareness campaigns coupled with policing will somehow prevent drug use.

It won't. Policing just drives prices up a notch. And as for awareness, Rahul Mahajan hails from an ideological background that's deeply anti-drugs. (In passing, the BJP-RSS ideological hassle about drug use is inconsistent since the Hindu shastras are cool on this particular issue.) Did Mahajan Jr's background stop him?

In 1986, India adopted an American-style anti-drug policy. US drug abuse rates have risen every year for decades and it has the highest drug-related crime rates. Why must we replicate this model?

The earlier Indian policy was similar to the Dutch. The Dutch decriminalised marijuana in the 1970s and offered support to addicts who wished to quit. Holland has lower addiction rates than the rest of the European Union, which, in turn, has lower addiction rates than the US.

Compared to the US, ancillary crime is also a lot less in the EU, especially in Holland. Instead of struggling with drug-related crime, the Dutch government gets a slice of drug-related revenues since dealers and cafes where drugs are sold pay taxes. That makes it a lot easier to support public awareness and de-addiction campaigns.