There is a ritual grammar to anti-narcotics campaigns in India. A stadium. A ceremony. A pledge. Padyatras. Banners invoking the children of the nation. The Nasha Mukt Jammu Kashmir Abhiyan, launched on April 11 from MA Stadium in Jammu — structured around awareness, enforcement, rehabilitation, and evaluation across 100 days — follows this grammar and, in several meaningful respects, exceeds it. Within five days of launch, more than 45 FIRs were registered and 63 smugglers arrested. A new Standard Operating Procedure mandates cancellation of passports, Aadhaar cards, driving licences, and arms licences of traffickers alongside asset attachment and financial investigation under the NDPS Act. The newly notified J&K Substance Use Disorder Treatment, Counselling and Rehabilitation Centres Rules, 2026, provide a regulatory scaffold to standardise de-addiction infrastructure. Whether this Abhiyan graduates from orchestrated spectacle to structural intervention will depend on something considerably harder than political will: institutional design, sustained financial intelligence, genuine community mobilisation, and the administrative courage to measure success by recovery rates rather than arrest tallies alone.
The scale of what this campaign inherits must be stated without mitigation. Data placed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment estimate approximately 13.48 lakh active substance users across J&K — 11.8 lakh adults and, most disturbingly, 1.68 lakh adolescents between 10 and 17. Alarmingly, over 95,000 of those minors are struggling specifically with opioids. The mean age of first drug use, according to the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (IMHANS) Srinagar, falls between 17 and 23 years — among the lowest nationally. According to IMHANS, the institute receives 150 drug addiction cases per day, and over 33,000 syringes are being used daily for heroin injections across the region. These are not abstract statistics. They represent an entire stratum of pre-adult life being consumed before it has properly begun.
The substance-wise profile deepens the alarm. Opioids account for the largest proportional burden — 4.47 lakh users at a prevalence rate of 5.05 per cent — with heroin carrying a dependency rate of 88.8 per cent, compared to a relatively modest 29.9 per cent for cannabis. Heroin seizures across J&K grew more than fivefold in just four years — from 15 kilograms in 2018 to 80 kilograms in 2022 , and in late 2024 and early 2025, Jammu Police reported a major crackdown with over 28 kilograms of heroin recovered, having a market value of over Rs 129 crore. Approximately 70 per cent of drug users test positive for Hepatitis C at IMHANS. The average heroin addict in Kashmir spends approximately Rs 90,000 per month sustaining the habit — a figure that simultaneously explains the desperation feeding property crime and the colossal financial flows sustaining trafficking networks.
Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha has been explicit: “Our hostile neighbour uses drug trafficking as a tool to fuel terror and weaken the nation from within.This is not rhetorical excess. The Ministry of Home Affairs’ 2022 Annual Report documented the convergence of cross-border smuggling with militant financing — narco-terrorism in the ministry’s own terminology. Security agencies have gathered growing evidence that the drug trade is linked to the financing of terrorism, with heroin and other drugs pushed into the region using drones, underground tunnels, and couriers. Kupwara, Baramulla, Uri, Samba, and Kathua are identified as high-risk areas for smuggling due to their proximity to the Line of Control and the International Border. In 2025, three State Level Joint Coordination Sub-Committee meetings for J&K were convened, and a new NCB zonal unit was established in Srinagar to enhance oversight along vital routes, signifying an institutional recognition that the issue has surpassed the current framework.
J&K leads all Union Territories in NDPS cases. By September 2025, 1,342 NDPS cases had been reported in J&K, resulting in 1,305 charge papers submitted to the court. In 2025, 81 properties valued at Rs 16.64 crore were seized, 215 arrests were executed under the Prevention of Illicit Traffic in NDPS Act, 222 hotspots were identified, 44 were demolished, and 1,350 individuals were subjected to active surveillance. Notwithstanding a 50 percent increase in NDPS cases, conviction rates remain markedly low. The financial disruption provisions of the SOP are methodologically more advanced than any previously implemented. The critical question is whether J&K’s judicial processing infrastructure, forensic capacity, and inter-agency coordination between the NCB, NIA, ED, and State Investigation Agency are commensurate with the ambition.
Here, we must move beyond epidemiology and enforcement into the more uncomfortable terrain of social theory. The drug crisis in J&K is, at its deepest level, a symptom of a society under extraordinary structural strain. Robert Merton’s theory of anomie provides an instructive lens: when legitimate pathways to social aspiration are blocked — by unemployment, distrust, or the psychological residue of prolonged violance– substance abuse emerges not as irrational deviance but as a rational adaptation to an irrational social environment. Youth unemployment, high rates of post-traumatic stress from regional conflict, and socio-economic stress are identified contributing factors.CMIE’s 2023 data placed J&K’s youth unemployment at 18.3 per cent against a national average of 10.1 per cent. These structural explanations are real but they carry a dangerous corollary. When they displace rather than supplement individual and collective accountability, they generate a fatalism that is itself an obstacle to recovery.
Durkheim’s foundational argument that social integration functions as a protective buffer against self-destructive behaviour — finds empirical confirmation in J&K’s own data. The 2019 national survey found that children from households marked by parental neglect or emotional unavailability were nearly twice as likely to experiment with substances before the age of eighteen.The effects of decades of violence on social cohesion are harder to see in the big picture. The treatment gap heightens the stakes: almost 41,000 addicts were treated at the GMC Srinagar Drug De-Addiction Centre between March 2022 and March 2023, with numerous cases involving the sharing of needles and the subsequent transmission of Hepatitis C.
Yet against 13.48 lakh estimated users, formal therapeutic coverage remains structurally inadequate. A 2022 CAG performance audit found bed occupancy in government-run rehabilitation centres below 60 per cent — not for want of addicts, but because stigma, family denial, and inadequate outreach prevent people from seeking help. The infrastructure partially exists. The social permission to use it does not. That is a gap no SOP closes.
This is precisely where the Abhiyan must reconceive the state’s role — from regulatory authority issuing directives downward to mobilising force rebuilding the social institutions capable of preventing abuse before it begins. The J&K administration must embed parenting support as a formal, funded campaign component: panchayat-level workshops in accessible language, ASHA workers and schoolteachers trained to identify early warning signs, dedicated helplines for parents who suspect substance use but do not know where to turn. The School Education Department, in coordination with Mission Youth, must make parent-teacher engagement on drug awareness a structured, sustained fixture of the academic calendar — not a token annual event.
Community mobilisation must convert panchayats, self help groups and university campus from ceremonial participants into structured early-detection networks with trained, remunerated coordinators. Imams, pandits, and community elders carry moral authority no government circular can replicate. A 2019 meta-analysis in The Lancet, covering 58 low- and middle-income countries, found that community-based prevention programmes reduced substance use initiation among youth by up to 34 per cent — considerably outperforming enforcement-only strategies. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has spent Rs 777.19 crore under the National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction since 2020. The question is not whether money has been spent. It is whether the model being funded is the right one.
Global evidence is unambiguous. Portugal’s 2001 decriminalisation model — redirecting state resources from criminal prosecution to public health intervention — produced a 75 per cent reduction in drug-related incarceration and a 50 per cent fall in HIV infections among users within a decade. Kerala’s Subhodayam programme demonstrated that community-anchored rehabilitation integrating family counselling with Opioid Substitution Therapy and livelihood support generates lower relapse rates than institutional treatment alone. Durable solutions emerge not from the state acting upon society but from the state acting with it.
The Nasha Mukt Jammu Kashmir Abhiyan arrives with more institutional seriousness than its predecessors. But 13.48 lakh users, a dominant opioid burden, 33,000 syringes used daily, a cavernous treatment gap, trafficking networks of documented geostrategic depth, and a society carrying decades of unprocessed trauma demand proportionality of response .
The drug crisis will not recede through enforcement alone. It will begin to retreat when families speak openly, communities hold each other accountable, institutions provide recovery without judgment, and the state earns the trust needed to make all three possible simultaneously. The next 100 days will reveal whether this Abhiyan can sustain its momentum past the stadium. How much of an impact it has had on the structural landscape will be found out in the forthcoming days. Giving the first answer isn’t enough; the campaign’s targeted audience—the youth of Jammu and Kashmir—deserves the second answer as well. Every one of us has a responsibility to fulfil in this matter.
