At its Wednesday meeting, the Federal cabinet decided to undertake fresh measures for the eradication of drug addiction, which, it noted, has already affected nearly four million people in this country. A cabinet committee has been formed to examine possible remedial measures and submit its recommendations back to the cabinet within 30 days. Besides, the ministries of education, information, religious affairs, health, social welfare, and narcotics have been directed by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to create public awareness about the menace that is said to have brought Pakistan the unsavoury distinction of being the largest consumer market for heroin in the whole of south-west Asia region.
The problem of drug addiction, especially heroin, in this country is the direct outcome of the influx of Afghan refugees that began, more than two decades ago, with the US backed Afghan Mujahideen's fight against the Soviet supported government in Kabul. It was then that a whole new term "heroin and Kalashnikov culture" entered the local lexicon with reference to Afghan influence on Pakistani society.
Later on, the Taleban rule significantly brought down the cultivation of poppy and production of heroin in Afghanistan, though the country remained one of the world's major heroin producers, largely because the heroin traffickers were still using their old poppy stocks.
Following the collapse of the Taliban regime, poppy cultivation has seen a big upsurge, and so has heroin smuggling through Pakistan, creating an even bigger consumer market in the country. The problem, needless to say, has global dimensions. And Pakistan, on its own, cannot stop the flow of illicit drugs through its border with Afghanistan.
What it can and must do, though, is to adopt a well thought-out strategy to reduce the use of these drugs in this country. As a matter of fact, it is required to do so as per its commitments to UN Drug Control Progamme under a master plan it prepared in collaboration with UNDCP a few years ago. Hence it is not something new that the cabinet has decided to undertake in deciding to curb the consumption of illicit drugs. Yet it is important in terms of a renewed governmental resolve to grapple with the scourge of drug abuse.
The cabinet committee is to include representatives from the ministries of health and social welfare, which actually have the main role to play through joint work in detoxification, treatment and rehabilitation centres for the addicts. In fact, it was announced at the cabinet meeting that the Health Ministry is in the process of setting up a pilot drug rehabilitation centre in Islamabad, which is to be inaugurated by the Prime Minister as early as the middle of the next month.
Similar centres are soon to be established in different parts of the country. The other ministries can surely lend a helping hand. But their role must not be merely to offer sermons about how bad it is to use drugs - which is already an established fact known to all and sundry - but how and where the addicts, or their families, can seek help to give up drugs.
Some may want to point to the example of poppy cultivation having come to a virtual stop because of an edict issued by the Taleban supreme leader, Mullah Omer. But it needs to be remembered that the Taleban achieved that great feat not just through the issuance of a religious decree, but because it imposed a ban on poppy cultivation which was implemented through severe punishments for violators.
It is imperative, therefore, that in order to make its demand reduction efforts meaningful the government lays more emphasis on offering various forms of help to the affected people and less on portraying drug addiction as evil doing.
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