By Napoleon S Mawphniang
When I walk through Iewduh on a Tuesday morning, past vendors selling kwai and fermented fish, I notice something that would have shocked my grandparents—young boys, barely past their school uniforms, eyes hollow and hands trembling, whispering to strangers near the corners. Last week, my neighbor’s seventeen-year-old son was found collapsed in Polo Bazaar. Heroin. The week before, a mother in Laban discovered her daughter, a promising student, stealing money for what she called “medicine.” These are not isolated tragedies. They are symptoms of a legislative gangrene that has infected our state while we debate punishments instead of providing cures.
Let us speak plainly: the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act of 1985 is a relic, a juridical fossil that punishes the sick while the disease spreads unchecked. In a state where three lakh people—roughly one-tenth of our entire population—battle substance dependency, we continue deploying an antiquated law designed in a different era, for a different country’s political purposes. This is not merely poor governance; it is institutional cruelty dressed in legal robes.
Consider what research published this year in the Indian Journal of Public Health reveals: drug initiation in Meghalaya begins as early as age ten—far younger than neighboring Manipur or Nagaland, where the average is twenty-two. Ten years old. That is fifth standard. That is an age when children should be worrying about mathematics homework, not navigating the treacherous world of nitro tablets and spasmo-proxyvon.
The study, conducted by the Indian Institute of Public Health in Shillong alongside the Meghalaya AIDS Control Society, surveyed 128 individuals enrolled in opioid substitution therapy across East Khasi Hills, West Jaintia Hills, and East Jaintia Hills. What it found should alarm every thinking person. Over one-third of users started as minors. A quarter were still in school when they first experimented. More than 91 percent are male, 80 percent toil in the unorganized sector, and over half never completed ten years of schooling.
Heroin—that demon we thought distant—now courses through our veins, with users spending between Rs 500 to Rs 2,500 daily to feed their addiction. Access, the study notes grimly, is “easy” through marketplaces and mobile transactions. Once peer sharing ends, many resort to borrowing or stealing. I know this pattern intimately; a young man whose family lives near mine works odd jobs that barely pay enough for survival, yet he manages to find money for drugs by pilfering from his mother’s purse. This cycle transforms victims into criminals, addicts into thieves—and the NDPS Act treats them identically, hurling them all into the same punitive apparatus.
Here is where the absurdity becomes tragicomic. Between 2020 and 2025, Meghalaya’s Anti-Narcotic Task Force registered 653 drug-related cases. Convictions? A paltry 25. That represents less than 4 percent success rate. Meanwhile, NDPS Act crimes in Meghalaya exploded from 69 cases in 2021 to 189 in 2023—a 174 percent increase. Last week alone, authorities seized drugs worth over Rs 4 crore. Since 2023, the state has confiscated narcotics valued at more than Rs 400 crore and arrested 100 people this year alone.
But whom are we arresting? On August 26, 2025, at Umkiang Police Patrol Post, officers apprehended Hajrat Umar from West Bengal and Phulchand Ali from Lum Survey, Shillong, recovering 137.86 grams of heroin worth Rs 60 lakh. The next month, on September 29, police intercepted Chuchung Serto and Thanggin Towthang from Manipur near Jowai, seizing 512.63 grams of heroin valued at Rs 2.5 crore. These are small-time carriers, mules in the supply chain. Meanwhile, the true architects—those whose bank accounts swell while our children waste away—remain comfortably insulated from prosecution.
Former Social Welfare Minister Paul Lyngdoh inadvertently acknowledged the law’s fundamental flaw when he stated we cannot simply “take drug users from the streets and throw them into jails” because “withdrawal symptoms may take their lives”. Think about that admission. Our own government recognizes that applying the law as written would literally kill the people it claims to protect. Yet we persist with this framework, proposing specialized NDPS courts to process more cases through a fundamentally flawed system.
The NDPS Act did not emerge from Indian soil or Indian needs. It was transplanted wholesale during Ronald Reagan’s global “war on drugs” crusade of the 1980s. Reagan’s administration threatened sanctions and international marginalization against nations that refused to criminalize drug use according to American specifications. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, eager for Western approval and modernization credits, obliged with legislation that transformed India “overnight from a country that had no law regarding narcotics to one sporting one of the harshest in the world”.
The irony cuts deep. Our ancestors mentioned cannabis use in the Atharvaveda around 2000 B.C. The 1893 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission—after exhaustive study—concluded that “moderate use of hemp drugs was practically attended by no evil results at all”. Sadhus employed certain substances in spiritual practice without societal condemnation for millennia. We possessed, in other words, a mature, nuanced understanding of intoxicants. Then we abandoned this wisdom for Victorian moralism imported from a culture grappling with its own pharmaceutical hysteria.
The Economic Times editorial board articulated this precisely: the Act reflects “a Victorian stigma towards recreational drug intake” and represents the West imposing “its own phobia on a laissez-faire India”. We adopted not just their law but their delusion—the belief that harsh punishment deters addiction, that incarceration heals compulsion, that fear cures disease.
Portugal decriminalized all drug possession and consumption in 2001, treating it as an administrative rather than criminal matter. Two decades later, the results are irrefutable: serious drug use declined significantly, especially among youth; the criminal justice burden eased; treatment-seeking increased; drug-related deaths and infectious disease rates plummeted. Economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy examined the data and concluded: “One moderate alternative to the war on drugs is to follow Portugal’s lead and decriminalize all drug use while maintaining the illegality of drug trafficking”.
What Meghalaya needs is not more specialized NDPS courts to process our children through a broken system faster. We need decriminalization of personal use, treating small quantity possession as an administrative offense requiring treatment referral, not prosecution. We need massive investment in harm reduction infrastructure—needle exchange programs, opioid substitution therapy, community-based interventions addressing addiction’s social roots.
We need to eliminate the NDPS Act’s reverse burden of proof, which forces accused individuals to prove their innocence—a perversion of justice that would make our constitutional framers weep. We need generic scheduling mechanisms to pre-emptively control emerging synthetic drugs like “black tiger” and “double tiger” heroin variants that are ravaging our youth.
Most fundamentally, we need to stop criminalizing illness. A young man stealing from his mother to feed his heroin addiction does not need jail; he needs medical care, psychological counseling, and a community support system. A ten-year-old experimenting with pills does not need a criminal record; she needs intervention, education, and protection from the predators who profit from her vulnerability.
We have surrendered our liberty to think clearly about drugs, our traditional wisdom about substances, and our constitutional commitment to humane justice—all for the temporary safety of appearing tough on narcotics. The result? Three lakh addicts, a 221 percent increase in HIV/AIDS cases over nineteen years, children initiated into heroin use while still in primary school, and a conviction rate so abysmal it mocks the very concept of deterrence.
The NDPS Act is obsolete not because it is old, but because it was wrong from inception—a foreign solution to a problem we did not define, a punitive framework for a medical crisis, chains forged elsewhere but locked around our wrists. Until we possess the political courage to admit this, more mothers in Laban will discover their children’s addictions too late, more young men in Iewduh will hollow out before they turn twenty-five, and more families across Meghalaya will bury children we could have saved.
The question facing us is not whether we can afford reform. It is whether we can afford another generation lost to laws that punish suffering instead of healing it.
The writer is an Advocate, Trade Unionist, Ethicist & The Humanist Architect
