Last month 11 people were arrested in Bengaluru for selling narcotics to the public, and also to college students. Raids were conducted across the city, all as part of the same police sweep.

My initial reaction was the usual: good, get them off the street.

But then…

The answer is that no one would ever know. 

In a country where we are nowhere near being able to cope with the demand for drugs among our current million plus population of users and where we are failing to provide adequate addiction treatment to those who can get it, it seems strangely unimportant.

Which brings me to the fact that 2 anti- drug campaigns were launched back-to-back:

So no, this is not only slogan-baazi.

Both campaigns are aimed at the same two moments: the moment before someone starts, and the moment they get caught. 

Neither one says a word about a third moment, the one where someone's already dependent and wants out. 

So I went looking for how many people in India are actually stuck at that third moment, needing treatment nobody's talking about.

Karnataka's numbers back up the enforcement side. Over 6,600 people booked under the NDPS Act in five months. ₹185 crore worth of narcotics seized.

I'll give it that. That's serious enforcement.

But catching someone and treating someone are two different jobs.

A campaign can tell a teenager drugs are dangerous. It can put a peddler in jail. 

What it cannot do is walk into a hostel room and treat the kid who's already dependent, because that's not what a campaign was ever built to do. 

Back in 2019, AIIMS Delhi ran the most detailed national study India has ever done on this question. 

5.7 crore Indians with harmful or dependent alcohol use. 

Roughly 60 lakh with an opioid problem serious enough to need real treatment. 

That's a large number on its own. What it doesn't tell you is who actually gets help.

Among people dependent on illicit drugs, just 1 in 20 had gotten inpatient care. 

Even counting religious or spiritual help alongside medical care, treatment of any kind reached only 2.6% of alcohol-dependent people and 12% of drug-dependent people.

Sit with that next to the two campaigns for a second. Nationally, the overwhelming majority of people who need help for exactly this never get anywhere close to it.

They already know drugs are dangerous. Every single one of them does. Knowing was never the missing piece.

We never built the other half of this.

India runs de-addiction through IRCAs, government-funded rehab centres mostly operated by NGOs, and there are somewhere between 355 and 480 of them in the entire country.

Set that against 5.7 crore people needing help for alcohol alone and you get roughly one centre for every 1.5 lakh people. Before you even count opioids.

Plenty of the centres that do exist are barely holding on. 

Reports have documented individual ones going years without receiving grants they were already promised, some owed over a crore, still somehow keeping their doors open.

And who's supposed to staff them?

A pledge on a college stage costs an afternoon and a banner. 

A real treatment programme needs psychiatrists, trained counsellors, hospital beds, and months of follow-up care, and none of that gets built inside a single news cycle.

My first instinct was to write it off completely. Just Say No, the big American campaign from the 80s, ran in three-quarters of US schools at its peak.

The Surgeon General's office reviewed it years later and found no measurable drop in drug use.

Some research even suggests it made a few groups more curious, not less. 

So I almost filed the whole idea away as proof awareness never works.

Then I found a study out of Bengaluru schools that tested a real prevention programme, control group and everything.

It worked. Students scored meaningfully better on knowledge and on handling peer pressure afterward.

So awareness isn't nothing, it clearly does something for the kid who hasn't started yet.

It just can't reach the one three months into a habit he hasn't told anyone about. That kid doesn't need a pledge. He needs somewhere to go, and right now, almost nowhere exists.

I don't think Operation RISE or the Nasha Mukt Abhiyan are pointless. 

Reaching a crore young people with any message is not nothing, and a pledge signed at 19 can genuinely be someone's first real moment of deciding they want out. 

A campaign that tells a teenager a different life is possible, and that asking for help isn't something to be ashamed of, and it is doing something real. 

That part is worth protecting and not dismissing.

But hope needs somewhere to go afterward.

Those eleven arrests in Bengaluru didn't end anything. 

Somewhere in this city right now, a student who was buying from one of them is probably finding a new number to call. 

But somewhere else, maybe, another one is having the opposite thought, the one the campaigns were actually built to spark. Wanting out.

If that second student decided today that they wanted real help, I'm not sure where I'd actually send them. 

Not because nothing exists, a few real places do, but because none of it is built at the scale this problem actually needs. 

That's the gap these campaigns can't close on their own, and it's the one worth talking about next.

Hit reply and tell me: have you or anyone close to you tried to access de-addiction or psychiatric care in India, and what did that process actually look like?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. If you or someone you know needs help with substance dependence, AIIMS's National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre and NIMHANS both run de-addiction services, and Tele-MANAS (14416) is the government's free 24x7 helpline, available in multiple Indian languages.