In a crowded outpatient corridor at Srinagar’s main psychiatric hospital, a young man in a black hoodie keeps his gaze fixed on the floor, fingers worrying the edge of his registration slip as if he might tear his way out of the room. His father stands a few steps behind, hands clasped, shoulders bent inward, as nurses call out names in quick succession and the smell of antiseptic mixes with the sour sweat of people who have not slept. When their turn finally comes, the doctor barely has to ask what brings them here; the track marks on the son’s forearms answer first.

A generation hooked on heroin

Across Jammu and Kashmir, stories like this have become frighteningly common. A government backed survey made public in early 2026 identified around seventy thousand substance users in the Valley, nearly fifty thousand of them hooked on heroin, with a large share injecting the drug rather than smoking it. Other official and academic estimates suggest that roughly 2.8 percent of the Valley’s population are substance users, and that around ninety five percent of them are dependent on heroin, placing Kashmir among the regions with the heaviest opioid burdens in South Asia.

At the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Srinagar, the pressure of those numbers is visible in the daily routine. Doctors there say they now see 300 to 350 follow up patients a day, along with five to ten new cases, and that about ninety percent of these new patients are heroin users, many of them injecting. Between April and November 2024 alone the institute documented 1,137 drug related cases, a figure that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when cannabis and pharmaceuticals dominated the addiction charts.

How Kashmir landed on the heroin route

Kashmir did not become a heroin hotspot by accident. Geographically, the Valley sits close to the Golden Crescent, the arc of territory covering parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran that has long served as a production and trafficking hub for heroin bound for global markets. Afghan heroin moves across Pakistan, filters into India through states such as Punjab, and from there is routed towards Kashmir along trade roads, mountain tracks and, increasingly, across the Line of Control through aerial drops and small cross border networks.

A 2025 district wise analysis of narcotics trends found that heroin seizures in Jammu and Kashmir had grown more than fivefold in four years, from about fifteen kilograms in 2018 to eighty kilograms in 2022. The sharpest increases were recorded in valley districts, with Anantnag emerging as a major hotspot, accounting for nearly twenty kilograms of seized heroin in 2022, followed by Pulwama and Baramulla, which together represent close to sixty percent of all heroin seized in Kashmir. For law enforcement this confirms the region’s place on the trafficking map; for residents it means that a global supply chain now ends in their mohallas.

Conflict, trauma and the search for numbness

Three decades of insurgency and counterinsurgency have left Kashmir with more than visible scars. Studies and clinical observations point to high rates of depression, anxiety disorders, post traumatic stress and obsessive compulsive symptoms among people who grew up surrounded by gun battles, crackdowns and political uncertainty. For many young Kashmiris, particularly those who came of age after 2010, the years have been carved up by cycles of protest, curfews and the 2019 communications blackout that cut them off from the outside........

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