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War On Drugs!
Every other week, we read about the drug busts across the country. We have pills from across the border, and most of the hard drugs are coming in via air! Our police wallahs arrested three foreigners with cocaine worth Rs 7.5 crore a few days ago. Then, a few days before that, thousands of pills were confiscated, and I think the police had to fire some shots at the drug dealers driving from across the border to arrest them as well.
Maybe it's time we wage a War on Drugs as Nixon did back in the 70s in the US, but a little bit differently because his thing ended our so-called 'hippie' tourism in Nepal and also made the green stuff illegal in our land where folks had been using it for both recreational, medicinal, and even spiritual purposes for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years!
I think it's time we provide more resources to prevent our young ones from becoming new addicts. And the rehab thing for those who are addicted is not really working in Nepal. So, we need a new 'rehab' policy. Most of the rehab centers are operated not by the government but by private owners, most of them, former drug addicts themselves who have managed to recover and straighten out their lives.
But in reality, these rehab centers are worse than our prisons, with strict, inhumane discipline that includes severe beatings and harassment, and not allowing supervision or visits by the loved ones who had sent their folks there.
And it's not cheap, as many rehab centers charge more than Rs 10,000 per month, and we have read about the mental torture, forced labor, and even starvation in our rehab centers. The police have to either do a weekly surprise check on these centers or shut them all down because most of them have become just shady businesses.
In the 90s, it was more about pills and cough syrup, smuggled through India, that won the hearts and minds of lost souls in Kathmandu Valley. Today, the same pills rule the market, but hard drugs are easy to find as well. So, something must be wrong and not working at all when it comes to stopping drug trafficking in this country.
When it comes to the pills, young people cross the border, stuff some of them in their pockets in hopes of not getting caught, but they do get caught most of the time. Some use the unsupervised border routes and get lucky and make a small profit when the thing is sold in major urban areas.
And we seem to have harsh laws as well. Our laws punish drug users heavily, and a young lad or lady has to spend half a decade or more for being caught with a small amount of hard drugs, while it's a few years in prison for pill pushers.
But most of the time, the drug network never gets dismantled. The major drug dealers are never caught, and it's only the small-time retailers who get busted, mostly through their own users reporting the sales to the undercover cops for some leniency or for their own personal reasons or under threat as well.
When it comes to cocaine, it is a big thing in Kathmandu and Pokhara. Most of the users seem to come from byapari backgrounds. The Nepo Kid Sahujis and their entourage seem to enjoy the white powder during outings at the clubs and private house parties. According to our sources, many of the cocaine users in the valley are actually sons of Marwari businessmen who seem to get their stuff from abroad or from dealers from Goa. Their fathers drank milk and wheat bread, and I guess they are more into weed and white powder!
So, the best thing to do is to make sure the private rehab centers are closed down and the government steps in and provides better counselors, a better environment for them to recover from their addictions, and hopefully live a meaningful and productive life after recovery. Where's the budget? Well, maybe we can all pitch in and help the government because we cannot allow hundreds of thousands of young ones to get messed up with this drug thing! It will hurt us all in the long run!
It is time we studied some of the European countries that have decriminalized the personal possession of all illegal drugs. Punish the dealers, punish the gangs who move billions of Rupees worth of drugs into our country, but don't crowd our prisons by punishing the users. Send them for mandatory treatment and even community service for a year, but don't let them rot in jail, for they are not criminals.
But we should have harsh punishment for the pushers. Confiscate their property even if it is teen pustey and hard labor under Harka Sampang's 'Stone Age' movement.
We know that our drug laws are not working. We know that many times, our drug dealers are in partnership with our law enforcement agencies to make a profit for both. We know that the system is all screwed up.
Our government needs to study this and come out with a better, humane solution for our drug users, while maybe punishing the drug dealers and mafia by making them climb Everest in shorts and flip-flops. Well, that would be too harsh as well, but you get the idea, don't you?
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