The Drug Epidemic Swallowing the Valley’s Youth, and the 100-Day War to Stop It
Sarwar Kawoosa | May 2026
Kashmir has survived wars, winters, and decades of conflict. But today, a quieter, more insidious enemy is eating the Valley from within. One that doesn’t carry a gun, doesn’t wear a uniform, and doesn’t announce itself with a bang. It arrives in a syringe. It hides in a pocket. It whispers to a seventeen-year-old boy that everything will feel better in just a few seconds.
And Kashmir’s youth are listening.
What Is the Nasha Mukt J&K Abhiyan?
Something extraordinary is happening across the Valley right now. People are walking. Thousands of them, students, teachers, mothers, shopkeepers, soldiers, imams, panchayat members, are taking to the streets not in protest, but in purpose. The Nasha Mukt Jammu & Kashmir Abhiyan, launched as a 100-day anti-drug campaign, has become far more than a government initiative. It has become a people’s uprising against one of the gravest crises this region has ever faced.
The movement is built on a simple but powerful idea: addiction is not a crime. It is a disease. And like every disease, it must be fought with compassion, not condemnation. The Abhiyan calls upon every citizen, from the student in his classroom to the maulvi in his mosque, to stand up, speak out, and refuse to let the next generation be swallowed by drugs.
The Numbers That Should Keep Every Kashmiri Parent Awake at Night
Let us be brutally honest about what is happening here.
Nearly 13.5 lakh people in Jammu & Kashmir are trapped in substance abuse. That is not a distant statistic. That is one in every eight people you pass on the road to work. Of these, over five lakh are dependent on opioids, with heroin being the drug of choice for the overwhelming majority. In the Kashmir Valley alone, 95% of drug users are hooked on heroin, one of the most addictive and destructive substances known to mankind.
The youngest victims are the most heartbreaking. An estimated 1,68,700 children between the ages of 10 and 17 are already caught in the web of substance abuse. Children who should be solving mathematics problems are instead struggling with withdrawal symptoms.
Hospital data tells an even more alarming story. SMHS Hospital in Srinagar received over 41,000 drug-related patients in a single year, one person walking through those doors every twelve minutes, every single day. That is a 75% increase from just two years prior. The Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences found that 90% of drug users in Kashmir fall between the ages of 17 and 33, the precise years when a person should be building a career, a family, a future.
And then there is the financial devastation. A heroin addict in Kashmir spends on average nearly Rs. 88,000 every month feeding their addiction. Families are selling land, borrowing from moneylenders, and watching entire generations of wealth vanish into a needle. The Hepatitis C rate among intravenous drug users in the Valley has reached a staggering 72%, turning a drug crisis into a full-blown public health emergency.
How Did the Valley Come to This?
No crisis of this scale has a single cause. Kashmir’s drug epidemic was brewed slowly, over years, from a toxic mixture of geography, trauma, unemployment, and despair.
Kashmir sits at the doorstep of the Golden Crescent, the region spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran that produces the vast majority of the world’s opium. Heroin flows into the Valley cheaply and abundantly, smuggled through porous borders, passed along networks that have existed for decades. The proximity alone makes Kashmir uniquely vulnerable.
But geography only explains supply. What explains the demand is something deeper and more painful. The years of conflict, the trauma of living under prolonged tension, the loss of livelihoods, all of this created a generation of young Kashmiris carrying enormous psychological weight with nowhere to put it. When jobs disappeared and opportunities dried up, many young men and women found in drugs a temporary escape from a reality that felt unbearable.
Studies confirm it plainly: conflict and unemployment are the two biggest drivers of drug addiction among Kashmiri youth. Drug use in J&K increased by 1,500% in just three years. The Valley had never seen anything like it.
Marching Back from the Brink
This is precisely why the Nasha Mukt Abhiyan matters so deeply, and why it is different from anything that has come before.
Across every district, padyatras are winding through towns and villages. Students carry placards. Chemists take pledges not to dispense medicines without prescriptions. Schools hold pledge ceremonies. Army units join hands with civilian authorities to spread awareness in the most remote corners of the Valley. Poster exhibitions, art galleries, street plays, rallies — the campaign has taken every available form to reach every available audience.
The administration has backed the movement with real teeth. Properties of drug peddlers are being demolished. Passports and Aadhaar cards of those convicted under the NDPS Act are being cancelled. The message is unmistakable: the era of soft treatment for those who profit from Kashmir’s suffering is over.
A Movement That Has United a Divided Valley
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Nasha Mukt Abhiyan is who is standing behind it.
Imams are delivering anti-drug sermons from mosques. Shia community leaders, Gurudwara Prabandhak Committees, and representatives of the Hindu migrant community have all sat together and pledged their support, a rare and powerful show of interfaith unity in a region not always known for it. Religious leaders across every sect and faith have been personally invited to lead the charge, and they have accepted.
Politically, the movement has drawn voices from across the spectrum. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has called it a mission of the highest priority, urging every citizen to treat addiction with empathy rather than shame. Dr. Farooq Abdullah has publicly sounded the alarm, calling drug abuse a widespread threat that demands collective reflection. LG Manoj Sinha has not just spoken. He has walked, personally leading rallies in district after district, looking every young person in the eye.
When a region’s political leaders, religious figures, civil administration, law enforcement, and common people are all marching in the same direction, something real is possible.
The Kashmir That Waits on the Other Side
A drug-free Kashmir will not be built in 100 days. Let nobody pretend otherwise. The roots of this crisis go deep, and the road to recovery is long and difficult. But movements like the Nasha Mukt Abhiyan do something that statistics and enforcement alone never can. They change what a society believes about itself.
When thousands of citizens walk together through the streets of Srinagar and Bandipora and Baramulla and say, loudly, publicly, without shame, that they refuse to lose their children to addiction, something shifts. The stigma around seeking help weakens. The young person on the edge of disaster sees that someone cares. The family hiding a secret suddenly feels less alone. The drug peddler operating in the shadows feels the walls closing in.
Kashmir’s youth are not a lost generation. They are a stolen generation, stolen by a crisis they did not choose, in circumstances that were never fair. The Nasha Mukt Abhiyan is Kashmir’s way of demanding them back.
