'Drug Addiction Is a Growing Problem in Punjab Essay\r'

'1) Throughout the border conjure of Punjab, whether in villages or cities, drugs concord become a scourge. Opium is frequent, keen as heroin or other black-market substances. Schoolboys nightimes eat small black balls of opium paste, with tea, to begin with classes. Synthetic drugs atomic number 18 popular among those too deplorable to afford heroin.\r\n2) The scale of the riddle, if impossible to quantify precisely, is undeniably immense and worrisome. India has unrivalled of the world’s boylikeest populations, a factor that is expected to power future economical growth, yet Punjab is already a reminder of the demographic risks of a glut of young people. An overwhelming majority of addicts are between the ages of 15 and 35, according to one study, with many of them unemployed and frustrated by unmet expectations.\r\n3) For the Punjab government, the problem is hardly un cognise. Private drug handling centers, some run by quacks, have proliferated across the st ate, and treatment wards in government hospitals have seen a buckle in patients. Three years ago, a state health official warned in a butterfly affidavit that Punjab risked losing a whole generation to drugs. virtually 60 part of all illicit drugs confiscated in India are seized in Punjab.\r\n4) Yet when Punjab held state elections this year, the candidates seldom spoke near drug ab wasting disease. In fact, India’s Election Commission said that some governmental workers were actually giving away drugs to try to misdirect votes. More than 110 pounds of heroin and hundreds of thousands of bottles of bootleg hard liquor were seized in raids. During the elections, party workers in some districts distributed coupons that voters could preserve at pharmacies.\r\n5) Punjab’s reluctance to treat the drug situation as a full-blown crisis is part because the state government itself is dependent on tax income from alcohol sales. Roughly 8,000 government liquor stores croak in Punjab, charging a tax on all(prenominal) bottle †an excise that represents one of the government’s largest sources of revenue. India’s comptroller found that liquor outgo per person in Punjab rose 59 percent between 2005 and 2010.\r\n6) A sociologist in Amritsar, surveyed 600 drug addicts in rural and urban areas of Punjab and found that they were usually young, sorry and unemployed. He said that most villages did not have health clinics but did have three or four drugstores, which often made sizable lolly selling pills and other synthetic drugs to addicts who cannot afford heroin.\r\n7) Opium has a long history in Punjab, and was commonly and licitly consumed here before India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947. Today, Punjab is a primary gateway for opiates smuggled into India from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Opium is also big legally in India for medicinal purposes, and some of the restrict arrives in Punjab on the black market.\r\n8) The pro blem is prevalent in middle-class enclaves, where some users are strung-out on heroin. One impoverished neighborhood of Amritsar, called Maqboolpura, is known as the Village of Widows †because so many young men have died of drug abuse.\r\n9) In Kazikot Village, about a two-hour drive from Amritsar, a local nongovernmental establishment tries to prevent the spread of H.I.V. by regularly distributing uncontaminating syringes to addicts. The group’s workers say there are 48 hard-core addicts in the village (out of much than 2,000 people) but that many other people use drugs. Government officials have sponsored â€Å"camps” here, with health officials providing antidrug information or trying to persuade addicts to undergo treatment †neither of which, villagers say, has been successful.\r\n'