Outlook Magazine - Drugs Without Borders - 14 September 2026 Issue

More than five crore Indians use cannabis and opioids—roughly the population of Spain. Drugs are no longer confined to the margins of society. They are moving from affluent neighbourhoods to small towns and villages, feeding a rapidly expanding illicit market that is becoming more organised, more sophisticated and harder for law enforcement to contain. India’s geography makes the crisis even more dangerous. Wedged between the Golden Crescent in the west and the Golden Triangle in the east, the country sits between two of the world’s major narcotics hubs. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent Independence Day speech underlined the urgency of the challenge.The stakes could hardly be higher. Nearly one crore young Indians are estimated to be addicted to synthetic drugs, at a time when 27 per cent of the country’s population is aged 15-29. Every addiction carries a cost, not just to families, but to productivity, healthcare, the criminal-justice system and national security. India’s drug problem is a crisis capable of eating into the country’s demographic dividend and undermining its economic ambitions. In this issue of Outlook, we travelled to Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Haryana to understand how deep the crisis runs, and to tell the stories of people whose lives have been shattered by drugs.