Don’t Warn Them, Outbid The Dealer - O. P. Singh

Driving back late one night on the highway near Murthal, I stopped at a roadside dhaba for tea.

The owner, unprompted, began to talk about the young people who came in after midnight. Students, he said. Girls as well as boys. Many were drunk. Some were on something stronger.

They were not from desperate homes. What they did not have was anywhere better to be at one in the morning.

I have carried that conversation with me ever since. It says something our debate about drugs keeps missing.

We argue about whether to police harder or to warn louder. We rarely ask the simpler question: what are our young people supposed to do with their evenings?

A Billion Dollars Of Warnings

Warning louder has been tried, at enormous scale.

For two decades, police officers in thousands of American classrooms taught children to resist drugs under a programme called D.A.R.E. When researchers pooled the strongest studies in 2004, the effect was so slight it would have had to be twenty times larger to count as even small.

Between 1998 and 2004, the US Congress spent nearly a billion dollars on a national anti-drug media campaign for teenagers. The official evaluation found it did not reduce drug use.

Worse, the teenagers who saw the most advertisements came to believe their friends were all using cannabis and became more open to trying it.

The campaign's own slogan held the answer it never acted on. Teenagers were invited to complete the line "_____: My Anti-Drug." The example offered was "Soccer".

The right idea was printed on every poster. It just never made it onto a playing field.

The Student Who Knew More Than Our Slides

We have seen a version of this in Haryana.

In 2024, while I headed the state's narcotics bureau, one of our officers was taking a college audience through the dangers of drugs. A second-year student cut in. If a student like me knows where drugs are sold, he asked, why don't the police?

His classmates cheered. The officer had no reply.

That young man did not need our slides. He already knew more about the trade than we were telling him.

Every teenager in Haryana knows drugs are harmful. Knowledge is not what is missing.

The Empty Hour

What is missing is something to do.

Adolescence is the age at which the hunger for reward, excitement and the approval of friends is at its strongest. Boredom, at sixteen, is not an inconvenience. It is a pull.

And a long line of products is waiting to answer it. Drugs offer a high. Alcohol offers an escape. The betting app offers a rush that arrives just often enough to keep a boy tapping long after midnight.

Each sells the same thing in different packaging: a quick thrill for an idle hour.

A craving cannot be argued out of a young person. It can only be outbid.

What Outbidding Looks Like

Iceland understood this first.

In 1998, its teenagers drank and used drugs as heavily as any in Europe. The country stopped relying on warnings and invested in what young people did after school: organised sport, music, clubs, and parents drawn in as partners.

By 2016, the share of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the past month had fallen from 42 per cent to 5 per cent. The share playing organised sport rose from 23 per cent to 42 per cent.

Haryana once did something similar.

As the state's sports director, I created the Sports and Physical Aptitude Test, a scholarship with two conditions: be at the playground 22 days a month and stay away from drugs.

With 300 coaches, we expected around 10,000 children in the first year. More than 85,000 signed up. By 2013, the number had climbed to 1.5 million.

Give young people a reason to show up, and they will show up.

A Game Fills An Evening, A Future Fills A Life

That experience also taught me the limits of play alone.

A talented sixteen-year-old needs to see a path ahead: a team to make, a scholarship to win, a contract to sign, and a career to build.

That is why Vikalp Ka Sankalp, the pledge to offer young people real alternatives, must reach beyond recreation. It must include leagues in sports with a market far beyond India.

Consider baseball. In 2008, two javelin throwers from Uttar Pradesh, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, became the first Indians to sign professional contracts with a club in the United States.

Haryana's wrestlers and throwers have the strength, the speed and the temperament the game demands. I want to see a Haryanvi in Major League Baseball within five years.

The goal is not baseball for its own sake. A young man who can see a road to somewhere has every reason to walk away from the road to nowhere. And when one village boy makes it, a thousand others start to believe.

Arrests Cut Supply; They Cannot Cure Demand

Critics will call this soft.

Enforcement is serious work, and Haryana made a record 6,801 drug arrests last year. But over the past four years, the number of young people registering at the state's de-addiction centres has risen nearly fivefold.

There is also simple arithmetic in favour of alternatives. A warning addresses one danger. An alternative addresses all of them.

The girl at hockey practice at seven in the evening is not at the dealer's corner. She is not at the liquor vend. She is not on the betting app.

One well-spent evening shields her from all three. One real future shields her for good.

Our young people have heard every warning we have to give. What they are waiting for is an invitation: a place to go, a skill to master, and a person to become.

Give them that, and the lectures can stop. The playgrounds will do the talking.

About the Author: O. P. Singh is the CEO-designate of SANKALP, Haryana’s anti-drug society, and a former Director General of Police, Haryana. A distinguished IPS officer with extensive experience in law enforcement, his work focuses on narcotics control, public safety, law enforcement administration, and community-driven substance abuse prevention.

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