A tonne of ganja has been seized from various places in Kerala in the last 40 days, says excise commissioner Rishiraj Singh. The amount is greater than the annual haul in recent years. The Excise Department officials admit that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
If that was not disturbing enough, officers would tell you that most of the loads find their way to students. Gone are the days when ganja was considered a taboo in Kerala. Now the weed is touted as an essential accessory for an “intellectual”.
Ganja is a favorite way to get a high because it is cheap and odorless and the intoxication lasts long, excise deputy commissioner Jeevan Babu IAS said.
The department has registered 4,536 cases against peddlers who sold ganja near educational institutions since 2011. The police have registered another 14,862 cases. For some reason, Thrissur district takes the lead with 1,987 cases.
Still the menace of ganja and narcotic abuse among students has not been studied in detail in Kerala. The free availability of ganja has taken its toll on the social fabric of the state. Almost a third of the criminal cases registered in Kerala could be attributed to intoxicating substances including alcohol and ganja, data with the Kerala State Social Welfare Board shows. About 500 such cases have been reported from Thiruvananthapuram alone.
Unleashing violence
The association of intoxication with crimes becomes all the more scary when it comes to violence targeted at women. Almost 70 percent of the men accused of heinous acts against women were addicted to substance abuse, the police said.
Kerala witnessed 317 murders in the year ended March 2012. The number nearly doubled to 626 the next year. As many as 817 murders were reported since then.
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The spurt in crime coincides with the increase in ganja supply to the state and the police do not see this as a coincidence.
Even rape cases have gone up. As much as 3,214 rapes have been reported in the state since 2014, a shocking leap compared to 1,055 cases in the year ended March 2012 and 1,905 in the year ended March 2013.
Cases of sexual violence increased from 5,225 in 2011 to 14,708 in 2016. Violence against children rose from 1,395 to 4,787 in the period. Most of the accused were drug addicts in these cases.
Experts back the observation by the police. “We have read many news reports on how students are becoming crueler, as seen in a video in which a couple of students flung a puppy from the top of a highrise. I suspect that they have been into drugs. Intoxication brings out the latent violence in you,” said Dr K. Gireesh, the president of the Indian Association of Clinical Psychology.
He says he is faced with three categories of patients. “One, students up to the 12th standard who are addicted to substance abuse. The second group is composed of people aged between 35 and 55. They are looking for any kind of intoxication. The rest of the patients are students who have got into premier educational institutions such as IITs and IIMs.
“The school students amid my patients are hyper active but they do not want to study. They find cheap thrills in violating rules when they are on a high.”
He recounted the experience of an IIT student who was brought to him with severe symptoms of substance abuse. “His seniors advised him to smoke ganja to help him concentrate on his studies. That eventually became a habit. He would stay in his room for days on end, without taking a shower or brushing his teeth. His parents dragged him here. It took a long time to bring him back to his normal self.” Dr Gireesh said.
Road to perdition
Dr Arun P Nair, assistant professor (Psychiatry) in the Government Medical College Thiruvananthapuram, says that more and more students are into ganja. “I deal with three types of patients. There are people who get into ganja and drugs because they think it gives them happiness and helps them stay in focus. Others find consolation in alcohol and drugs to allay their sorrows and anxieties. Yet another group is composed of patients who get into substance abuse just succumbing to peer pressure,” the psychiatrist said.
“The first category has to be identified at an early stage and subjected to immediate treatment. They need life skills training. Parents have to track their children for behavioral changes. They have to be there for them and let them know it. Lastly, the law enforcers have to ensure that the drug supply chain is broken,” he added.
Dr Arun has seen some extreme cases. “This boy was only 12 years old. His parents did not know that he was smoking weeds until he became violent. He even attacked his parents. The boy was led to ganja by a neighbor. He found it a refuge to escape the problems at home. Gradually, ganja became unavoidable,” he said.
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Any treatment is two-pronged. “The patient is given medication to lessen his addiction. At the same time we rely on motivation therapy that coaches him to focus on pleasant things,” he added.
Sudden spike
The supply and consumption in Kerala has increased since the government ordered the bars to shutter, according to data submitted by the government before the Legislative Assembly. People find ganja an easier alternative to alcohol as the liquor supply slowed and a place to drink was hard to come by.
The government also pointed to a disturbing trend in which more people were encouraged into the ganja trade by lenient laws that allowed peddlers to get out on bail.
While Kerala is struggling with the social problems created by the ganja trade, areas in Andhra Pradesh which supply a large share of the contraband are unaffected by the weeds they pack off. The ganja cultivation is a monopoly of the Naxalites in those areas. They make the tribesmen tend to the ganja plants for a small reward. Then they distribute the loads to various parts of the country.
“The people who cultivate ganja do not use it. They are only interested in the income,” excise deputy commissioner Chithi Babu said in Visakhapatnam.
The Excise Department in Kerala is helpless in curbing the flow of ganja to the state. The department is unable to block the trade because the supply chain extends to many states. The official machinery cannot even think of entering the Naxal country.
The militants take the contraband on trains to Tamil Nadu before an intricate network takes it to Kerala. The Excise Department wants the Union government and the railways to take stringent action to block this route.
“We have submitted a note to the state government. We should have more harsh laws that ensures that a person is sentenced even if he possesses only 100 grams of ganja,” excise commissioner Rishiraj Singh said.
(Concluded)
