Heroin, hopelessness, and hidden networks reshaping a generation in Kashmir

Beneath the visible Valley, a war is quietly taking root – one fought with syringes, powder, and despair. Amir Yaseen examines how heroin addiction spread across Kashmir with devastating speed, transforming from a hidden vice into a public-health emergency. 

In the winter of 2023, a psychiatrist at Srinagar’s Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences – IMHANS, as everyone calls it – noticed a pattern that had begun to trouble him more than the statistics already did.

The heroin users arriving at the outpatient department were getting younger.

Not dramatically younger at first. Nineteen instead of twenty-three. Seventeen instead of nineteen. Then came boys barely in their mid-teens, brought in by fathers who avoided eye contact and mothers who spoke in whispers, as if addiction itself could spread through language. Some of the boys had bruised forearms from injections. Others had lost so much weight that their pherans hung from their shoulders like borrowed clothing.

The doctor had spent years working in Kashmir’s mental-health system, long enough to see trauma become ambient in the Valley – conflict trauma, political trauma, economic trauma, generational trauma. But heroin felt different.

“This is not episodic anymore,” he told a colleague. “This is structural.”

Outside the hospital, Srinagar moved through another cold morning. Shopkeepers swept snowmelt from storefronts. Security bunkers stood at intersections. Tourist advertisements promised paradise. Along the Jhelum embankment, boys in school uniforms laughed their way to class while, not far away, another set of boys stood in alleyways waiting for peddlers.

Kashmir has long been narrated through the grammar of insurgency and counterinsurgency: militants, soldiers, curfews, funerals, disappearances, shutdowns. But over the last decade, another conflict has quietly embedded itself inside Kashmiri society – less visible than militancy, more intimate than politics, and in some ways more devastating because it enters homes not through ideology but through sons.

Heroin.

Cheap, injectable, omnipresent heroin.

The epidemic has spread so rapidly across Jammu and Kashmir that officials now describe it in the language of national security and public-health emergency simultaneously. The administration’s response – the J&K Nasha Mukt Abhiyan, a sweeping anti-drug campaign involving police operations, awareness drives, rehabilitation efforts, school outreach, mosque sermons, and public rallies – reflects the scale of official alarm. 

But behind the campaign slogans lies a harder truth: Kashmir’s drug crisis did not emerge suddenly. It grew slowly inside decades of political instability, unemployment, untreated trauma, cross-border narcotics trafficking, social fragmentation, and the collapse of meaningful futures for large sections of youth.

The heroin epidemic in Kashmir is not simply a law-and-order story.

It is a story about despair becoming chemical.

The statistics surrounding drug abuse in Kashmir are so staggering that they often sound abstract until placed beside human bodies.

A landmark survey conducted by IMHANS Kashmir in collaboration with public-health researchers estimated opioid dependence in Kashmir at 2.23 percent, translating to more than 52,000 opioid-dependent individuals across the Valley. Of those, approximately 32,000 were injecting drug users. 

The same survey found that opioids accounted for 85.3 percent of substance abuse among participants, and that more than half of users preferred injecting drugs. Nearly half injected daily. Syringe reuse and sharing were common, raising fears of hepatitis C and HIV transmission. 

Researchers reported that users were spending an estimated ₹88,000 per month on heroin — a catastrophic amount in a region where unemployment among youth remains persistently high. 

Another study published in the International Journal of Research in Medical Sciences found that heroin injectors in Kashmir showed significantly higher addiction severity, earlier onset of use, greater medical complications, and elevated overdose risk compared to non-injecting users. Fifty percent of injectors in the study tested hepatitis-positive. 

The escalation has been startling even to doctors who spent years working in addiction medicine.

According to reporting cited widely across Kashmir, IMHANS saw heroin-related treatment demand increase dramatically after 2016. One estimate described a “2660% increase” in treatment-seeking patients over several years. 

What makes these numbers especially alarming is not merely the scale of addiction but the demographic profile.

The epidemic is overwhelmingly young.

Most users are between seventeen and thirty. 

And increasingly, they come from every class background imaginable.

Doctors describe sons of businessmen sitting beside labourers in rehabilitation wards. Engineering students undergoing detoxification beside school dropouts. Young men from affluent Srinagar neighbourhoods sharing counselling sessions with orchard workers from south Kashmir.

Addiction in Kashmir no longer belongs to the margins.

It has entered the middle of society.

To understand why heroin spread so rapidly in Kashmir, one must first understand what prolonged uncertainty does to a generation.

For more than three decades, Kashmiri youth have grown up amid militarisation, recurring violence, curfews, internet shutdowns, economic instability, political ruptures, and interrupted education. Mental-health researchers have repeatedly linked conflict exposure in Kashmir to elevated levels of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. 

Then came 2019.

The abrogation of Article 370, prolonged communication blackouts, mass detentions, movement restrictions, economic contraction, and later the COVID-19 pandemic deepened a sense of collective suspension already present in the Valley.

A rehabilitation counsellor in Pulwama described the period after 2019 as “psychologically corrosive.”

“Young people stopped believing life was moving anywhere,” he said.

Several academic studies now connect Kashmir’s rising substance abuse crisis to unemployment, social alienation, lack of recreational infrastructure, and untreated mental-health burdens. 

The sociological pattern resembles what addiction researchers elsewhere have described in economically and psychologically distressed regions: drugs flourish where futures collapse.

In Kashmir, that collapse often unfolds quietly.

A university graduate returns home after years of study and finds no employment. A teenager loses educational continuity after repeated disruptions. Families burdened by debt and uncertainty begin internalising hopelessness as routine.

Heroin enters these environments not initially as destruction but as relief.

A recovering addict from Baramulla described his first heroin experience with chilling simplicity.

“It made everything feel distant,” he said.

Distance is powerful in Kashmir.

Distance from fear.

Distance from anxiety.

Distance from memory.

But heroin eventually demands proximity to only one thing: itself.

Security agencies in Jammu and Kashmir increasingly frame the drug trade as part of a broader ecosystem involving organised crime, cross-border smuggling, and militant financing.

Official discourse now regularly invokes the phrase “narco-terrorism.”

Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha has repeatedly argued that narcotics entering Jammu and Kashmir are linked to networks operating across the Pakistan border. The Nasha Mukt J&K campaign explicitly promises to “cut off” narcotics supply chains and intensify punishment for traffickers. 

The geography matters.

Punjab, which accounted for nearly 44.5 percent of India’s heroin seizures in one recent national assessment, sits adjacent to Jammu and Kashmir and remains deeply affected by cross-border narcotics trafficking. 

Security officials describe multiple trafficking routes feeding narcotics into Kashmir: border infiltration corridors, highway transport networks, courier systems, and micro-distribution cells operating within towns and villages.

Yet the most important feature of Kashmir’s heroin economy may be its decentralisation.

Drug peddlers are no longer shadowy outsiders operating at society’s edges. They are often neighbours, classmates, cousins, former addicts, shopkeepers, students.

One police officer in Srinagar described arresting a man who sold heroin after working regular daytime shifts at an electronics store.

“He looked like anybody,” the officer said.

That ordinariness is part of the terror.

Because once narcotics become socially embedded, enforcement becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Communities know who the peddlers are. But testimony risks retaliation. Families remain silent out of shame. Some dealers finance their own addictions through small-scale distribution. Others are recruited because unemployment makes trafficking more profitable than ordinary labour.

Researchers examining district-wise narcotics patterns in Kashmir between 2018 and 2022 found dramatic increases in drug-related cases involving heroin, cannabis, tramadol, benzodiazepines, and codeine-based substances. 

The epidemic is no longer concentrated.

It is diffuse.

And diffusion makes containment harder.

Every morning at rehabilitation centres across Kashmir, patients arrive before daylight.

Some wear masks even after pandemic restrictions ended. Others ask auto drivers to stop a short distance away from clinic entrances to avoid recognition. Addiction remains deeply stigmatised in Kashmiri society, especially in smaller towns where reputation functions almost as currency.

Inside these clinics, however, shame quickly gives way to biology.

Withdrawal strips away pretence.

Doctors describe patients vomiting, trembling, hallucinating, sweating through winter nights, screaming for relief. Families often arrive exhausted after months or years of failed interventions – hidden cash, locked cupboards, stolen jewellery, violent confrontations, repeated relapses.

A psychiatrist at IMHANS explained that heroin dependency in Kashmir increasingly resembles “family collapse disguised as individual illness.”

Mothers monitor sons through the night.

Fathers borrow money for treatment.

Siblings learn to distinguish withdrawal symptoms before adulthood.

The emotional architecture of entire households reorganises itself around addiction.

One support worker recalled a mother who slept with her handbag beneath her pillow because her son repeatedly stole money during withdrawal episodes.

“She still called him my child,” the worker said.

Research increasingly confirms what clinicians already know intuitively: addiction in Kashmir is deeply intertwined with mental-health distress.

A review published in the International Journal of Advances in Medicine noted the growing overlap between substance use disorders, opioid dependence, and psychological stress in Kashmir. 

But treatment infrastructure remains fragile.

Government de-addiction facilities are overcrowded. Private rehabilitation centres vary dramatically in quality and oversight. Long-term recovery support remains limited. Relapse rates are high.

And among injecting users, public-health concerns continue escalating.

The IMHANS-linked survey found widespread needle sharing and reuse among heroin injectors. 

A separate study found that 72 percent of injectors shared needles and 80 percent reused them. 

In public-health terms, this transforms the heroin epidemic into a potential infectious-disease crisis as well.

For years, Kashmir treated addiction as embarrassment.

Families hid addicts.

Schools avoided discussion.

Communities whispered.

The Nasha Mukt J&K Abhiyan represents an attempt to force the crisis into public visibility.

Launched as an intensive anti-drug initiative, the campaign combines police crackdowns with public-awareness programmes, school outreach, community mobilisation, rehabilitation advocacy, and religious engagement. 

The campaign’s imagery is strikingly theatrical at times.

Students carry anti-drug placards through town squares. Police organise awareness rallies. Drivers undergo roadside urine testing on highways. Shikara rallies move across lakes carrying banners about addiction. 

Mosque imams have also been incorporated into awareness efforts. One report described more than one hundred imams enlisted to discuss heroin abuse during sermons and community gatherings. 

The symbolism matters.

Because the state appears to recognise that enforcement alone cannot contain an epidemic rooted partly in social despair.

Yet there are contradictions embedded within the campaign.

Critics argue that awareness drives risk becoming performative without corresponding investment in long-term rehabilitation, employment generation, mental-health services, and community-based support systems.

Some addiction specialists warn against excessive criminalisation of users who require medical treatment rather than incarceration.

Others argue the opposite — that trafficking networks remain under-policed.

This tension exists globally within anti-drug policy: whether addiction should primarily be approached as crime, illness, or social breakdown.

In Kashmir, it is all three simultaneously.

In political conflicts, women often become the archivists of damage.

Kashmir’s heroin epidemic is no different.

At counselling centres in Srinagar and Anantnag, support groups for mothers unfold with remarkable emotional restraint. Women describe years spent searching pockets, monitoring phone calls, hiding valuables, paying debts, negotiating with pharmacists, and waiting outside emergency rooms.

Their language is practical rather than dramatic.

“He doesn’t eat properly.”

“He disappears for days.”

“He becomes violent during withdrawal.”

“We sold gold for treatment.”

One mother described locking kitchen cabinets each night because her son stole utensils to finance heroin purchases.

Another said neighbours stopped visiting once rumours about addiction spread through the mohalla.

The epidemic has altered the emotional texture of domestic life in Kashmir.

Addiction introduces permanent uncertainty into homes already shaped by broader political instability.

Parents begin measuring evenings differently.

Not by dinner.

Not by prayer.

But by whether their child returns alive.

Like nearly every major issue in Kashmir, drugs eventually become political.

Some residents see the heroin epidemic primarily as a consequence of unemployment, conflict fatigue, and institutional failure.

Others frame it as deliberate social destabilisation linked to cross-border operations.

Both narratives contain elements of truth.

Academic literature increasingly emphasises socio-economic and psychological factors driving addiction in Kashmir. 

Security agencies emphasise narco-trafficking and militant financing. 

Public discourse merges the two.

On Kashmiri social media, discussions about heroin often move rapidly from rehabilitation to geopolitics. Reddit discussions referencing Kashmir’s heroin crisis repeatedly invoke conflict, militarisation, unemployment, and generational despair. 

One comment described addiction as “destroying Kashmiri youth.” Another noted seeing children as young as twelve “chasing” heroin. 

These comments are anecdotal rather than scientific, but they reveal something essential about collective perception: many Kashmiris experience the drug epidemic not as isolated criminality but as societal unraveling.

And perhaps that is what makes the crisis feel uniquely frightening.

Militancy kills visibly.

Addiction dissolves invisibly.

It erodes households from within.

Toward evening, Srinagar regains its beauty.

The mountains darken behind Dal Lake. Vendors sell tea beside the boulevard. Tourists photograph houseboats glowing under fading light.

From a distance, the Valley can still resemble the postcard version marketed to the world.

But another Kashmir exists beneath that surface.

A Kashmir of discarded syringes.

Of boys injecting heroin inside public washrooms.

Of rehabilitation wards crowded with teenagers.

Of mothers waiting outside counselling rooms clutching prayer beads.

Of fathers pawning land to finance treatment.

Of police raids in neighbourhoods where everyone already knows who sells drugs.

Of young men who no longer imagine futures beyond the next dose.

The tragedy of Kashmir’s heroin epidemic is not only that addiction spread so rapidly.

It is that the Valley already carried too much grief before heroin arrived.

And now, layered atop decades of conflict, uncertainty, militarisation, unemployment, and psychological exhaustion, addiction has become another inheritance threatening to define a generation.

Late one night beside the Jhelum, a recovering addict who had remained sober for nearly a year described addiction in terms that sounded almost political.

“When you are addicted,” he said, “you stop thinking long-term. You only think about surviving the next few hours.”

Then he looked at the river moving through Srinagar’s darkness.

“Kashmir feels like that sometimes too.”

 

About the Author

Amir Yaseen is a Srinagar-based journalist with an eye for the telling detail and an ear attuned to the cadences of Kashmir. He approaches news as narrative, locating the human story within the language of policy and progress and the quiet recalibration of everyday life.