oppn parties Bihar Moves From the Devil (Liquor) to the Deep Sea (Drugs)

News Snippets

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  • In Assam, a controversy erupted after a picture of UPPL leader Benjamin Basumatary, lying on a stack of Rs 500 notes circulated on social media. UPPL is an ally of the BJP
  • AAP's Jalandhar-West MP Sushil Kumar Rinku joins the BJP. He was the only AAP Lok Sabha MP
  • Supreme Court dismisses Centre's plea to review its 2023 verdict in the PMLA case
  • Close save for passengers as they remain unhurt after the wings of two planes graze at Kolkata airport. Pilots derostered and inquiry ordered by DGCA
  • Bengal BJP leader Dilip Ghosh gets notice from the EC as well as the BJP for making ugly remarks about Mamata Banerjee's parentage
  • Sadanand Vasanth Date, who faught terrorists in the 26/11 attack and was awarded the Preisent's Police medal, has been appointed the head of the NIA
  • Centre will borrow Rs 7.5L cr in the first six months of FY25, nearly 50% of the target for the full year
  • 25 stocks, including SBI, will see same day trade settlements from today in the world's fastest settlement mode in both BSE and NSE
  • Stocks recover smartly on Wednesday: Sensex rises 526 points to 72996 and Nifty 118 points to 22123
  • Tennis: Rohan Bopanna-Matthew Ebden reached the semifinals of the Miami Open
  • IPL: records tumble as SRH beat MI in a high-scoring match. SRH score 277/3 with 18 sixes and Mumbai score 246 with 20 sixes to fall short by 31 runs. Atotal of 38 sixes, highest in an IPL match were hit and both teams combined to score 523 runs, the highest aggregate in an IPL match
  • Amul will launch fresh milk in the US
  • IPL: RCB beat Punjab by 4 wickets as Kohli and Karthik shine with the bat
  • India strongly objected to German foreign office remarks over the arrest of delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, called it "biased assumptions"
Delhi Lt Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena says government cannot be run from jail, hints at President's Rule in the capital ////// In a dangerous incident, the wings of two planes grazed while taxiing on the runway at Kolkata airport, all passengers were safe but DGCA ordered an inquiry and the pilots were derostered
oppn parties
Bihar Moves From the Devil (Liquor) to the Deep Sea (Drugs)

By Slogger
First publised on 2017-04-11 20:45:56

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Holding an extreme view and carting the ball out of the park is what interests him most. He is a hard hitter at all times. Fasten your seatbelts and read.
Alcoholics in Bihar, where total prohibition has been imposed under draconian laws, are adopting another, more damaging, poison. There are reports that they are converting to substance abuse. Heroin, ganja, cannabis, inhalants, sedatives and opiods are all seeing a rising sale graph and drug peddlers are creeping out of the woodwork. Though bootlegging has till now not assumed the gigantic proportions it was expected to, the problem of drug abuse and their open availability is even worse. There are stray cases of people dying after consuming spurious liquor but that happens in states that allow liquor sale too. What is deplorable is that the state government has not been able to take effective steps to check availability of psychotropic drugs and their increasing abuse by alcoholics.

Although the problem of drug abuse is an old issue in the state, with newspaper reports as far back as 2002 saying that there was an alarming increase in substance abuse in Bihar. A report in The Times of India in 2002 pointed out that contraband drugs seized had more than doubled to 131 that year compared to just 61 in 1999. It also reported that drugs were now sold in front of schools and colleges. But the post prohibition scenario is more alarming for the simple reason that drug abuse is now replacing alcoholism. Alcoholics are not known to be substance abusers but prohibition in Bihar is throwing up a new phenomenon.

Alcoholics who would have never indulged in substance abuse are being pushed in that direction simply because liquor is not available. The proof of this lies in the fact that the state had sent 38 doctors to get special training in de-addiction at NIMHANS in New Delhi. The state government, at the time of announcing prohibition, had sought to justify it by saying that it had consulted health experts and had taken measures to handle cases of withdrawal symptoms and worse. But it had not factored in the whole scale conversion of alcoholics to substance abuse. In seeking to deliver the people from the devil, the state government has pushed them into deep sea.