Drug addiction destroying Chitral youth

Chitral -- Drug addiction amongst teenagers is alarmingly increasing in the district, specially in the Chitral town area. A place where simplicity and clean living used to be the distinctive features of everyday life, hardly a day passes when drug related petty juvenile crimes, like stealing, shoplifting, etc are not reported.

Amongst the villages of Chitral town, Goldur and Jughoor are known to have maximum number of drug addicts. Besides heroin opium and hashish, drugs like Restoril, tunal , AT1, valium10, tincture etc are in use with the first mentioned drug 'Restoril' being the most deadly and most widely used.

 Whereas control of narcotics and drugs in the town can be effectively administered if there is a will with the police but somehow this curse goes almost unchecked and except for superficial actions no serious effort has been made by the police to rout out this menace.  when CN investigated the causes of increasing drug addiction, it was found that frustration and lack of faith in the social and governmental system drives youngsters to escapism in the form of drug addiction.

Elders whether they be national leaders, religious preachers or society seniors do not give any inspiration to the young generation and the young ones seeing no light ahead choose the path of darkness for at least a temporary relief.

A crash program for rehabilitation of drug addicts and indoctrination of the young generation needs to be carried out. All schools should include lessons on drug abuse in their syllabus and frequent lectures in all educational institution about drug addiction prevention needs to be carried, out as soon as possible. -- CN report, 24 May 2011..