When a young person falls into addiction, society rarely asks what happened before the first dose. We are quick to condemn, quicker to label, and quickest to distance ourselves. Addiction is often explained as the consequence of poor choices, weak character, or moral failure. While individual responsibility cannot be ignored, reducing addiction to a personal weakness oversimplifies a problem deeply rooted in society. If addiction were merely about individual choice, awareness campaigns and punishments alone would have solved it. Yet the problem continues to grow.
I believe the real question is not why people become addicted? But what kind of society creates conditions where addiction becomes an escape?
As human beings, we know that no child dreams of becoming addicted. Every child begins life with aspirations, curiosity, and the hope of becoming someone. The journey towards addiction rarely begins with drugs. It often begins with loneliness, unresolved emotional pain, unemployment, family conflict, social isolation, peer influence, academic failure, or the feeling that one’s future has already been decided. By the time substance abuse becomes visible, many invisible struggles have already accumulated.
This is why I believe addiction should be understood as a social process rather than a single event. What begins as experimentation can gradually become abuse and eventually dependence.
Addiction is sustained by much more than biology. It is also shaped by a broader social and economic environment. Modern drug culture has evolved into a parallel social system with its own networks, identities, economic interests, and relationships. Publicly, society condemns drugs. Yet the illegal drug economy continues to expand because it generates enormous profits for traffickers, suppliers, and organised criminal networks. This contradiction should force us to ask uncomfortable questions. If drug abuse continues to flourish despite widespread condemnation, then the problem extends beyond individual users.
Another dimension that often receives little attention is money. Addiction is expensive, and as dependence grows, so does the financial burden. When legitimate resources and personal savings are exhausted, some individuals resort to theft, deception, drug peddling, or other unlawful means. This does not mean addiction automatically produces crime, but it shows how dependence can push vulnerable people towards desperate choices. The relationship between drugs and crime is therefore often driven by survival rather than intention.
In my opinion, the greatest damage caused by addiction is neither physical nor financial; it is social. The moment an individual’s addiction becomes publicly known, society starts to replace understanding with stigma. Families lose trust. And friends also withdraw. Even educational institutions distance themselves. Communities begin to identify the individual as bad and evil as an addiction not by their humanity. And this social rejection creates another tragic irony. While mainstream society excludes the individual, drug-using groups often provide acceptance, identity, and belonging. The very behaviour that leads to exclusion from one social world becomes the basis for inclusion in another. Here we fail to help recovery as a result, recovery then becomes more than overcoming a chemical dependency; it becomes a struggle to regain a place in society.
So this cycle explains why criticism alone rarely transforms lives. Constant rejection often pushes individuals deeper into the very environment society wants them to leave. Once mainstream relationships collapse, drug networks may become the only remaining source of acceptance, and reinforcing the cycle of addiction.
The vulnerability of young people deserves particular attention. Across many societies, young adults face growing uncertainty that creates addiction. Unemployment alone does not create addiction; it’s prolonged uncertainty, economic insecurity, educational inequality, family dysfunction, peer influence, social exclusion and absence of meaningful opportunities.
Recognising the seriousness of the issue, the administration launched the Nasha Mukt Jammu & Kashmir Abhiyaan under Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha. The campaign combined public awareness, action against drug trafficking, rehabilitation, and counselling. These efforts reflect an important institutional commitment to tackling substance abuse.
Their importance cannot be denied. Strong law enforcement disrupts supply chains. Public awareness encourages communities to remain vigilant. Rehabilitation services offer individuals a chance to rebuild their lives. Yet these efforts also invite a deeper sociological reflection. Can awareness campaigns and policing alone eliminate addiction if the social conditions that make addiction attractive remain unchanged?
A young person may attend an anti-drug awareness programme in the morning and return home in the evening to unemployment, family conflict, untreated depression, academic pressure, social isolation, or a neighbourhood where drugs remain easily available. Awareness may increase knowledge, but knowledge alone cannot replace hope, opportunity, or belonging. So, preventing addiction requires more than telling young people what they should avoid. It requires creating conditions where education leads to opportunities, families provide support, and young people can see a future to work for. So we can build a drug-free society.
I believe prevention begins long before the first drug is consumed. We as a society also make the greatest mistake by taking addiction as if it belongs only to addicts. But in reality, addiction reveals something about society itself. Addiction tells us that this is not just an individual story. It reveals the kind of society we have built. It reveals where opportunities exist only for some, where emotional suffering remains invisible until it becomes a crisis, where communities notice addiction but overlook the loneliness and exclusion that often precede it. By the time a person is labelled an addict, society has usually missed many earlier moments when intervention was still possible.
We should ask ourselves at all levels of institutional systems, from the bottom to the top. What conditions make addiction easier to choose than hope? And that attitude will guide our attention from the individual alone to the environment in which that individual is trying to survive.
Laws are important to dismantle trafficking networks. Awareness campaigns can inform communities. Rehabilitation is helpful for people to recover. In my opinion, we cannot build a drug-free society simply by removing drugs. We must build a society where young people no longer feel the need to escape their reality. That, I believe, is where the real solution begins.
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