In a cramped ward of a de-addiction centre in Srinagar, a young man, call him Omar, a composite of many real stories, traces the grain of the wooden bed with his fingertip and admits, in a voice almost too small for the room, that he can’t remember who he was before the needle. He remembers a school uniform, a scholarship question paper, a sister who laughed too loud. He remembers a winter when everything felt heavy and someone offered him a way to feel lighter. That light became a trap.

Kashmir’s heroin crisis is not a single thing you can point to on a map. It is thousands of private collapses stitched together: families who whisper about shame, neighbourhoods where young men vanish for days, hospitals that become revolving doors. Official and investigative reports make the scale hard to ignore, a parliamentary panel and multiple surveys put the number of people wrestling with substance abuse in Jammu & Kashmir in the hundreds of thousands, with estimates frequently cited around 13.5 lakh individuals and a worrying number of minors among them.

Why heroin? The drug’s presence in the Valley is partly geographic. Kashmir sits not far from historical trafficking routes but geography alone is a poor explanation for why so many young people choose to plug themselves into oblivion. Local psychiatrists and recent reporting show a brutal shift: where medicinal opioids or cannabis once predominated, intravenous heroin has surged, bringing with it more violent addiction, higher relapse rates, and a rise in blood-borne infections. Clinics in Srinagar report daily hundreds of new and returning cases, and clinicians have warned of a rapid and “exponential” increase in substance use in recent years.

You cannot read those dry numbers without seeing the injuries behind them. Decades of conflict have left a psychological residue: a generation raised beneath curfews, military gates, and a social life narrowed by suspicion. Add to that high youth unemployment and the collapse of predictable futures, and you get a pressure cooker in which heroin can feel like an answer or a way to quiet fear, pain, anger, and the constant hum of uncertainty. Journalists and clinicians who work inside Kashmir describe addiction as both a symptom and a coping mechanism: not moral failure, but an emergency response to........

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