Something is hollowed out in the homes of Kashmir. Parents know it before they name it. A son stops coming home for dinner, and a daughter borrows money she cannot explain. The furniture stays the same, the tea still brews at four, but the center of the house has gone missing. 

This is the texture of Jammu and Kashmir’s drug crisis, and it is far more intimate than any statistic can capture.

The numbers, however, demand attention. 

Parliament was told this year that over thirteen lakh people in Jammu and Kashmir use addictive substances, with opioids leading every category. More than thirty-two thousand drug-related cases have been registered since 2022.

These figures show a social reality that has moved well beyond isolated pockets of misuse. The crisis now touches villages outside Srinagar, small towns in Jammu, and families who never imagined they would need to learn the vocabulary of addiction.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is the changing face of the user. 

The age of first exposure is dropping. Injectable opioids are replacing milder substances, making dependence deeper and recovery harder. 

At the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Srinagar, doctors see five to ten new cases every single day, many of them young people who started with prescription tablets and slid into heroin. 

The shift is clinical and irreversible. Once a person moves to intravenous use, the body rewires itself around the needle. Hepatitis C rates among users have climbed past seventy percent. Over thirty-three thousand syringes change hands daily in the valley. This is a public health emergency touted as a law-and-order........

© Kashmir Observer