Srinagar | WTNS | Aga Syed Amin Musvi| July 01:Apart from political uncertainties under which Kashmir was baking now a different kind of war rages a quiet, chemical war. No bombs. No drones. Just the slow, silent corrosion of a generation. In the dark alleys of Jammu and Kashmir, addiction is not just a crisis. It is an apocalypse dressed as routine.

Fourteen lakh and counting. That’s not a statistic. That’s a dirge. A mass grave of children, teenagers, and men folded into hospital beds, alley corners, and whispering wards swallowed by syringes, powders, pills. Among them are 1.68 lakh children yes, children aged ten to seventeen, already spiralling into the abyss. Ninety-five thousand of them hooked on opioids, their childhoods bleeding into shadows before they ever knew what innocence meant.

The report accessed by Wilayat Times doesn’t cry. But we should. It lists the abominations coldly cannabis, opioids, sedatives, inhalants, stimulants, hallucinogens. It tells us of children inhaling plastic bags filled with poisons to forget the sound of silence in their homes. It tells us of adults drinking themselves out of memory, because remembering hurts too much.

And yet, where are the flags? The speeches? The moral panic?

In the southern veins of Kashmir, a counsellor whispers what the mountains already know:

 “The real disease is shame. The silence. The stigma. By the time families speak, the child is already halfway to the grave.”

Firdous Ahmad, a social worker from Srinagar, walks with the burden of truth every day:

“This crisis doesn’t knock anymore. It breaks doors. Every home, every village, touched. Twelve-year-olds on therapy mats. Seventeen-year-olds on detox beds. This isn’t rare. This is normal now.”

Rehabilitation centres dot the landscape, but they’re half-empty of staff and overflowing with sorrow. There’s no one to talk to. No one to listen. It’s easier to vanish than to heal.

And then there’s the government’s National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction a beautiful name for a half-born promise. Launched in 2018 with all the right intentions, it now lies scattered on desks, buried under the weight of bureaucracy and forgetfulness.

What it could have done offered skills, livelihoods, second chances is now what it could still do, if anyone remembers.

But numbers aren’t enough. What of the mothers who can’t sleep? The fathers too ashamed to speak? The sisters who lock up the medicine cabinets?

What of the suicides no one investigates, the crimes born of withdrawal, the lovers who vanish in the maze of heroin dreams?

Tobacco, too, claws at the lungs of this wounded land. 20.8% usage sixth highest in India. Another quiet killer.

And still, we wait for a Drug Policy that speaks the language of reality not cold statistics but blood, breath, and broken glass. We need:

Rehabilitation that breathes.

Counsellors in every school not just prayer assemblies.

Community campaigns that shout louder than shame.

Job opportunities that offer more than hunger.

A crackdown on pharmaceutical mafias treating young lives like disposable syringes.

The truth? Addiction is not the problem. Silence is.

The experts are right. The counsellors are exhausted. The families are breaking. And the generation we are losing doesn’t even know it’s being buried one capsule, one fix, one forgotten promise at a time.

And when they are gone, not even the valleys will echo their names.