On any given night in Kochi, you could be out with friends when you’re stopped by the police. No warning; their hands are in your pockets before a word is spoken. Your phone is searched, and its messages are probed for traces of drug slang. As with most who undergo this routine, there is no arrest; it is a routine check-up without any necessary probable cause.
This is the ‘stop-and-search’ method of policing made infamous by the United States. Similarly, in Kerala, this method has contributed to the 24,517 narcotics-related arrests in 2024, a 330% rise compared to the previous year, with a conviction rate of 98.9%, the highest in the country. In 2023, Kerala police began using rapid mobile drug testing kits that can detect narcotics consumed weeks ago through saliva samples. The kit is used in the ‘randomised’ stop-and-search campaigns.
With a clear spike in drug use in recent years, the state government positions itself firmly in a ‘war on drugs’ style campaign. In recent days, as the news fills up with alarmist reports of drug busts, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and several others in government have come out with statements on the issue. As the law stands, possession of ‘small quantities’ of drugs can land you up to six months of ‘rigorous imprisonment’. There is a strong case to be made that such a heavy-handed punitive approach is unscientific, ineffective, and most importantly, inhuman.
The statements made by the government, and the actions of its police on the ground show a strong dissonance in many ways. Although there is some talk of how drugs are a ‘social issue’ the Chief Minister’s statement mostly frames it in terms of individual moral failing of the drug user. While there exists a contradiction in the statements, in the real world, the policy that is in effect is punitive and moralist.
Both in government and in Opposition, many see this as a natural, acceptable, and perhaps the only approach to take during a “drug crisis”. A brief overview of the history and the present of public policy in dealing with drugs across the world reveals a spectrum of approaches. The most famous, and perhaps the most influential one is the American system, with its heavy-handed iteration, the “war on drugs” campaign that was championed by the then US President Ronald Reagan in 1971.
This approach, as the name indicates, results in the criminalisation of the user, and gives the police practically free reign to enforce the law or to bend and break it when necessary for the ‘greater good’. Over the decades, there have been plenty of critiques of this approach, the one that is perhaps most important to note here is its abject failure in curbing drug use, while at the same time militarising the police and normalising surveillance. This neo-liberal campaign began an emphasis (which most conservatives around the world later echoed) on the ‘individual moral failure’ of the drug user. “There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals” as famously asserted by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The campaign also famously resulted in violent policing and mass incarcerations of minorities.
Classifying drugs are not neutral
Both the colloquial and legal categories of “drugs”, far from being a neutral classification, are politically and morally loaded. It is also historically contingent, reflective of ideological forces rather than objective pharmacological risk or scientific evidence. The most demonstrable illustration of this contradiction is that for most of the world alcohol does not fall into any schedule, and kills more than all the other drugs combined.
The demonisation of the drug user into a caricature of mindless zombies who operate in some irrational realm of instant and fleeting gratification serves to do little to explain the complex phenomenon of drug use. This trope is then magnified and entrenched by the media, mainly the news and cinema banking on middle-class anxieties of the (for the lack of a better word) ‘un’-gentrification of neighbourhoods and the breakdown of the family with the children going ‘beyond their commands’.
The mostly unsaid anxiety of capitalists serves as an ideological primer. Drug user caricature does not fit into the notions of the disciplined and productive worker. This caricature is then used to attain a popular sanction for more and harder policing.
What can be inferred from the assertion that drug abuse is a ‘social issue’? The superficial interpretation which often shows up looks at the new mass-culture of cinema and music as a convenient scapegoat, which supposedly influences the youth into such habits. On closer inspection, it is apparent that several social institutions would have already had to fail and therefore a considerable amount of alienation had already set in for a movie or a song to influence a person to take up drugs or become an addict. So, understanding what ‘social issue’ means here requires a more compassionate view of the user.
Drug use is often seen as a particular kind of ‘crime’ where the first ‘victim’ is the user. Such a view obscures the relationship an addiction of any kind has with the alienation that comes with capitalist modernity. Capitalism severs social ties and replaces them with economic ones, often destabilising the old social institutions. This doesn’t mean that drug use can be solved by any kind of return to tradition. The use of various intoxicants as a community activity is indeed a well-documented pre-modern and prehistoric activity, indicating its deep social roots.
Freud argues that civilisation is a site of conflict by the social over the individual towards the aim of social cohesiveness. In this conflict, drugs serve as a lubricant for the assertion of the individual. However, in contrast, it also plays a subversive social role as users commune into ‘in-groups’ of quiet solidarity.
This helps explain why neither criminalisation nor pathologisation has been helping in any real terms, however one defines victory here. The cop-out is often to move the goalpost of victory to the number of drug-related arrests and call it a day. The conservative reaction also entails the blaming of various minorities as ‘unwanted externalities’ that brought drugs into the otherwise pristine natives. Africans, North Indians, Nepali, and Bangladeshi migrant labourers have been selected to play this role in the Keralite imagination, with this strain of thought only gaining momentum by the day.
Punitive measures provide temporary optics
Beyond these abstractions, this is what is known, that a drug that once finds a sustainable user base in a population, and embeds itself into the culture cannot be policed away. History gives us examples to the contrary. Punitive measures can, at best, only provide temporary optics of a ‘clean’ exterior, while pushing the real issues into the dark where they fester.
Furthermore, there are significant economic implications, where a harsh crackdown disrupts supply but increases the price, which, although riskier for the supplier, offers greater rewards for the daring individuals who adapt quickly. For the users, a disruption means moving towards more commonly available, but riskier substances. In this way the approach has been proven to hurt who it claims to protect.
While the legal definition and punitive actions are determined by the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985 under the Union government, it is important to note that the state government still has significant agency in the amount and nature of policing, healthcare, and setting the mood of an overall holistic approach to solving the crisis. This flexibility between the law and the state policy is exemplified in the curious case of marijuana, which in Kerala is treated as some demon substance from hell, while in many parts of North India, there is much open consumption by people of all kinds in the form of bhang during Holi.
In 2016, Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government, led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan rolled back a policy of alcohol prohibition set in motion by the previous Congress-led UDF government. Pinarayi argued that bans only fuel bootlegging and organised crime, citing examples from the real world. The move was also an admission that punitive measures, while politically seductive, often worsen the very problems they claim to solve.
Views expressed are the author’s own. Varkey Parakkal is a PhD Scholar in Sociology at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.