Oyan (Arunachal Pradesh), Jonai (Assam): In 2017, Yano (name changed) was a Class IX student in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, when a group of friends offered her something they promised would deliver an “intense high”. Curious, she smoked the brownish substance inside a small tobacco tin. Without a second thought, she handed over Rs 500 to a peddler. She had no idea that the first puff would mark the beginning of a years-long battle with addiction.
Within days, Yano’s craving became overwhelming. Desperate for another hit, she started searching for the peddler. To her, brown sugar was simply a “foreign” drug unlike kani (opium), the narcotic she had grown up hearing about.
For the next three years, until the Covid-19 pandemic, she was hooked on brown sugar—the impure, street form of heroin, often mixed with adulterants. Around 2020, she graduated to “a whitish powder that looked like Horlicks”— a far more potent and expensive drug. It was heroin, and this time she was injecting it.
Today, at 24, Yano has left narcotics be – hind after two rounds of residential treatment at a rehabilitation centre in Yingkiong, a town in Upper Siang district. Unemployed and estranged from her mom and two sisters, she is rebuilding her life.
ET Bureau “I am a recovering warrior,” she says with confidence. That phrase is more than a personal affirmation. It is also the name of a civil society group she has recently joined. Recovering Warriors is an yet to be registered organisation in Oyan, a small town in Arunachal Pradesh, about 12 km north of Murkongselek, the last railway station in north Assam and a lo – cality widely regarded as a hotspot for drug trafficking.
Yano has a single mission: to ensure that the young do not walk the dark path that once consumed her.
DRUG ROUTE Once viewed largely as a transit route for narcotics from the Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, Northeast India is now confronting a far more troubling reality: its own people are taking drugs. Arunachal Pradesh—particularly the districts along the Siang River (known as the Brahmaputra in Assam)—has also been drawn into the crisis, although it lies outside the principal drug trafficki
Read More