Janan Hassan

There is a reason this story is always told from the middle – not from the first transaction, not from the first border crossed, not from the moment despair met distribution and called it medicine, but from the overdose, the relapse, the final breath of the person with an addiction already deemed disposable – because to trace the story back to the beginning would mean indicting the systems not yet ready to stand trial, to admit that addiction does not erupt but is engineered, that its conditions are laid like scaffolding. The collapse it causes is not accidental but operational. And that kind of truth does not sit well with power, which prefers its grief neatly boxed, its victims quietly buried, and its enablers left unnamed.

Michael Cetewayo Tabor said it without flinch: capitalism plus dope equals genocide, and Kashmir is now learning what Harlem already knew: that when empire no longer needs to extract, it begins to sedate; when resistance threatens to outlive control, substances are piped in to blunt the rage, soften the grief, and turn the revolutionary into the recovering, the agitated into the anaesthetised, the broken into the busy – busy surviving, busy relapsing, busy trying not to die long enough to re-enter a society that still has no place for them. Tabor spoke of Black communities, flooded with heroin in the wake of political awakenings, flooded again with crack when the heroin lost its grip, punished for both dependencies but never compensated for the conditions that made the dependencies inevitable – and what he named then was not simply a domestic pattern but an imperial logic. A logic that now shows itself here, repackaged in the form of capsules and synthetic opioids, flooding a valley long wrung dry by surveillance and sorrow.

Afghanistan, post-invasion, became a case study of this logic – where opium production didn’t shrink under occupation, it surged, metastasised, and became the only reliable export in a nation promised freedom but delivered dependency. A land where warlords were tolerated, but poppy fields were never fully eradicated, because the substance became useful, a pressure valve, a currency, a threat deterrent, a quiet killer of ambition, and what emerged was not a failed state but a functional narcotic zone… one that made pain profitable and profit untouchable. Those routes did not close when the troops withdrew – they pivoted. And what once moved through Afghanistan’s wounded soil now also travels across rivers, mountains, and unmapped trails into the heart of Kashmir, where the checkpoints do not stop them, the patrols do not search them, and the state – omnipresent in protest, but absent in overdose – pretends not to see.

The drug crisis in Kashmir is not a story of poor border control – rather, it is a story of poor people being controlled through borders – borders that block ideas, aspirations, resistance, but not drugs. Because drugs are not dangerous to power, drugs do not have principles or ask for azadi. Drugs pacify, they numb, until they finally kill.

The Corridor and The Contradiction

These narcotics do not fall from the sky or slip through the cracks of a careless border – they move through corridors laid decades ago, inherited by new actors, renamed by new policies, but never truly dismantled. What once carried insurgents now carries powder, what once moved conviction now moves capsules, and the route has not changed so much as adapted, refined, become quieter, more efficient, more commercially viable.

The valley is not a place where events transpire at random – it is one of the most monitored, mapped, and militarised zones in the world. A space where the movement of people is slowed to a crawl, where convoys dictate the tempo of traffic, where signal towers hum with surveillance and checkpoints bloom like weeds, each one cataloguing, inspecting, measuring. And yet, somehow, these substances move unimpeded, travel long distances without interception, arrive precisely where they are needed and vanish precisely when questioned.

This is not a lapse of oversight but the performance of oversight; where omniscience is weaponised selectively, where the mechanisms of control sharpen in the face of dissent but blur around death, where addiction is not seen as a threat until the corpse count rises high enough to be visibly inconvenient. And even then, the response is not repair but restraint, not healing but humiliation, as if to prove that the only lives worthy of protection are those still compliant, those still useful, those not yet burned by the fire they were left inside.

To believe that heroin and synthetic opioids move into Kashmir without knowledge, without tolerance, without some degree of permission is to think that checkpoints are decorative, that radar exists for spectacle, that surveillance functions only when politically convenient – and if that is true, if this silence is by design, then we are no longer speaking of failure but of complicity, of a system that would rather police ideas than prevent overdose, that would rather catalogue anger than interrupt grief, that would rather claim peace while renting out death by the capsule.

And here, the parallels return – just as the fields of Afghanistan were never dismantled but merely redrawn, the networks of Kashmir were never demilitarised, merely reconfigured. The substance changed, but the pattern did not: desperation plus availability equals dependency, and once dependency becomes normal, resistance becomes muted, and once resistance is muted, the system can claim stability –  the only metric it was ever designed to protect.

The Shapeshift: From Syringes to Silence

What began with poppy has evolved into pill – the shift is not only pharmacological but political, not only chemical but aesthetic – where heroin marked the body with tracks and bruises, pills dissolve the evidence, bypass the drama, enter homes like medicine, remain unchallenged for just long enough to take root; and by the time families realise what is swallowing their children, the capsules are already in the bloodstream, the withdrawal already on its way, the dependency already complete.

Synthetic opioids do not shout as heroin does. They whisper, mimic legitimacy, arrive in clinical packaging, often prescribed, often passed hand to hand with the casual mercy of someone trying to help, trying to soften pain, trying to manage despair without knowing that what they are giving is not time but theft: a theft of clarity, a robbery of the very pain that once warned the body to fight – and when the pain returns, it returns doubled, feral, unforgiving, because withdrawal is not just physical here, it is existential.

And that is what makes synthetics more terrifying – not that they kill more, although they often do, but that they kill differently, slowly, through illusion. They offer the person with an addiction the fantasy of control, the myth of moderation, the sense that this is not addiction because there are no needles, no alleyways, no scorched arms or bloodied floors; but addiction, like war, evolves with the weapons used, and pills have collapsed the timeline: what once took years now takes months, what once unfolded in stages now descends in spirals.

For the valley, this acceleration is not just a medical crisis – it is a temporal one: a generation that no longer ages into addiction but is consumed by it before adulthood has even crystallised, before life has begun to carry shape, and the society watching this unfold (or refusing to) is not merely negligent but disoriented, unsure whether to grieve or to punish, to hide or to confront, and so it does what it has always done when faced with pain it cannot afford to politicise: it retreats. Pills are not political in the way protests are – they are harder to ban, harder to arrest, harder to condemn without implicating the very networks that helped birth them… and so they remain, accessible, affordable, increasingly synthetic, increasingly engineered for intensity, and increasingly targeted not at those seeking pleasure but at those seeking pause.

This is the point most outside the valley fail to grasp – most users did not begin with euphoria in mind. They started with fatigue, with dread, with the unbearable weight of a future that no longer arrives, a present that does not bend, a history that bleeds through every classroom and job rejection and security pat-down… and when that weight becomes unmanageable, the pill becomes not an escape but a sedative, a way to slow the moment just enough to survive it until even survival becomes poisoned.

Verses to Justify Inaction

There is a tendency, when collapse becomes unignorable, to reach for theology/religion as refuge – to wrap devastation in verses, to speak of qadr, to call suffering a test and endurance a virtue. And while these words are not untrue, they are often misapplied, weaponised even, to excuse the very systems that created the devastation in the first place, to shift the weight of culpability downward onto the shoulders of those already on the floor, and in doing so, they preserve the impunity of those who orchestrated the collapse and walked away untouched.

In Islām, the metric of justice is obligation. Harm is not merely what is done, but what is allowed, what is tolerated, what is ignored when protection was possible, and in this framework, silence is not neutral; it is treason. Ẓulm. And ẓulm is not limited to the tyrant who swings the sword.

One victim of addiction told me: “They’re doing what we’re failing to do – the occupiers. They’re following the Qur’ān… They know that spreading immorality is the easiest way to destroy a nation.”

And in that sentence was centuries of reversal, the shame of being outstrategised by an enemy who understands our own Book better than we implement it – not in its rituals, but in its warning; because the plan isn’t just occupation by force, it’s occupation by fracture: distract the youth, desecrate the moral core, flood the streets with sedatives, and let the nation rot from within, quietly, while the masājid still echo with verses that no longer land.

And so when we speak of qadr (divine decree), we must remember that Allāh does not test without reckoning, does not send trials without assigning accountability. When a society normalises addiction, systematises silence, and builds surveillance faster than it builds care, then its trials are no longer proof of innocence, they become evidence – evidence that the trust was broken, that the amānah was abandoned, that those with resources did not merely fail to intervene but chose to prioritise discipline over mercy, optics over healing, and that choice will not be forgotten.

Every person living with a substance use disorder is a test, yes – but not just for himself. For the family that watches, for the community that whispers, for the institutions that ignore, and most of all, for the system that made drugs circulate like oxygen — expected, unnoticed, essential.

Inequality, Relapse, and The Terrain That Does Not Forgive

Recovery is often narrated as willpower – a triumph of the self over the substance, a return to clarity through effort and intent. But in the valley, recovery has little to do with will and everything to do with infrastructure; with what waits outside the clinic doors, with whether a boy has a home that hasn’t disowned him, a family that hasn’t gone into debt trying to save him, a job that won’t shatter under the weight of relapse.

In this landscape, the person with an addiction does not return to a blank slate; he returns to the same collapsing architecture that pushed him toward the pill in the first place.

Inequality shapes not just who becomes addicted but who survives it, who can stay clean without being crushed, who is allowed to recover without re-entering the same.

Anxiety, stagnation, and surveillance that once escaped feel necessary, and this is where the narrative collapses – because the people with an addiction who relapse are not weak but logical souls responding to terrain that has not changed, to expectations that remain cruel, to families who love them but cannot carry them forever, to jobs that do not hire the previously broken, to mosques that offer forgiveness but not familiarity.

Treatment costs are staggering, and by the time most families reach the point of seeking admission, they are already emptied – financially, emotionally, spiritually – they are already choosing between survival and surrender, between a second loan and a funeral. And even when they pay, they pay with no promise of resolution, no certainty that their son will come back whole, no guarantee that wholeness is even possible anymore.

Inside the centres, the difference between recovery and collapse often rests on what exists beyond their walls – stability, housing, income, dignity and when those things are absent, every gain becomes temporary and every clean day feels conditional. Because the truth is: recovery in Kashmir is not a pathway, it is a rebellion – against gravity, against the repetition of despair, against a system that does not welcome the healed, let alone the healing.

The people with substance abuse issues do not talk about the drugs, not really – they talk about failure, about pressure, about futures that never arrived, about being compared to versions of themselves that were imagined elsewhere and demanded here, about silence in the house and shame in the community and the slow internal death of being seen only as a warning – and in that silence, the pill serves as an anchor / the only reliable thing in this world.

Reckoning Without Euphemism

To speak truthfully about this “epidemic” is to hold its contradictions without deflating them, to refuse both romanticism and resignation, to understand that this is not a matter of bad choices or broken souls. Still, of systems that allowed the flow, policies that refused to intervene, governance that watched addiction spread and chose surveillance instead of support, arrest instead of rehabilitation, optics instead of outcomes – and if this is not structural violence, then the term has no meaning.

This is not a crisis that emerged in a vacuum – it is political, it is economic, it is historical, and it is intentional in the way all neglected crises are intentional: permitted to persist so long as they do not disrupt the balance of power, so long as the decay remains quiet, so long as the addiction-afflicted die discreetly, without protest, without procession, without enough collective noise to warrant intervention, and even when that noise arrives, it is met with caution, not compassion – because in places like this, to admit failure is to accept responsibility, and responsibility is always the last thing power is willing to carry.

But the evidence is no longer avoidable: the routes are traceable, the deaths are accumulating, the pills are everywhere, the addiction is not hidden – it is threaded into the fabric of daily life, into school dropouts and job rejections and medical emergencies and prayer lists and morgues. Still, the silence persists, not because no one knows what is happening, but because the architecture that enabled it has not yet been named loudly enough to be dismantled.

The real fix is unspeakable under watch, but here’s what can be said and done: Treatment must be subsidised as a form of restitution. Centres must expand – geographically, institutionally, mentally and spiritually. Addiction cannot be contained by one or even five buildings, no matter how dedicated their staff – it must be approached like the public health emergency it is, not with raids and reports but with care that is consistent, sustained, and impervious to political reprisal. Families must be supported, not pitied, not blamed, but given access to training, to group counselling, to the tools that allow them to remain soft without being destroyed, because unaddressed household trauma is one of the most reliable predictors of relapse.

Healing is not linear; it is communal and chaotic, and it requires resources, space, and a refusal to let shame dictate when support is offered.

None of this is radical. What is radical is the current reality: a valley drowning in pharmaceuticals, saved by a handful of centres and a handful of exhausted hands; while the infrastructure that should have been mobilised remains elsewhere, focused on other things, guarding other perimeters, investing in everything except repair.

In Islamic thought, justice is not a virtue – it is a requirement, and the strength of a society is measured not by how it punishes the fallen but by how it cushions the fall, how it interrupts the descent, how it rebuilds the ground beneath its most wounded before collapse becomes permanent… and if that measure is applied here, then we have not just failed – we have fled.

Kashmir has endured visible brutality for decades – this violence, on the other hand, is quieter, slower, more intimate, but no less lethal. And if we continue to scrutinise addiction-afflicted while shielding the system, to pathologise the broken while preserving the machinery that broke them, then we are not exercising caution but simply playing into the hands of the agents responsible and performing misdirection.

The person with an addiction does not owe us his recovery or his repentance – it is we who owe him a world that does not make the drug his only relief.

Author’s note: The framing of addiction as the endpoint of poverty, grief, surveillance, and unemployment would be incomplete if it implies that those are the only valid precursors, because the horror here is not just that narcotics respond to despair, it’s that they are available even when despair isn’t loud enough yet, that someone can spiral not just because they were crushed by the world but because the pills were close, the dealer was known, the curiosity was cheap, the heartbreak was recent, the boredom was unbearable – and the distance between “I’m fine” and “I need to numb this” was made shorter not by personal weakness, but by systemic access.

When narcotics are easier to find than holistic care, when painkillers move faster than jobs, when trauma is only one of many roads into the same collapse, then addiction is no longer a personal trajectory – it’s a public infrastructure. It adapts to the user’s context, it doesn’t require justification, and its availability becomes the real crisis.

And perhaps this adds another layer to the scandal – not just that the wounded reach for numbness, but that numbness is sold at such scale, such speed, with such silence, that even fleeting pain can now end in chemical dependency; not because people are too weak, but because access is too easy. No one should be able to ruin their life with a capsule the same way someone might ruin a weekend. And yet here we are.

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Janan Hassan is a writer from Kashmir.

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