International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking 2021

Celebrated every year on the 26th of June is the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. It surely does pack a mouthful of heavy words, but it is as big a deal as it sounds. Drug abuse has become a menace to society and today is all about acknowledging this problem.

Stop and help before it's too late; Image Source: IndiaTimes.com

Sure, Tony Montana and his dollar bills made snorting coke seem cool, along with Jordan Belfort who couldn’t get enough of quaaludes to start a “high” and so did every other movie that’s associated with illegal activities and the mafia or the crime world. But then comes the common point where these movies come from: how drugs single-handedly can destroy your life. If a person already made bad decisions, taking drugs could make it worse. If someone was on their path to becoming successful, taking drugs could be the start of their downfall. If a person is too depressed to live right now, drugs can give them purpose…only to make their lives much worse. You might sugarcoat it as much as you want to, but the result will always come to the worse. This is the reality behind drug abuse, spoiler alert: it’s an endless struggle if not taken care of.

While movies might come from a fictional storyline, they do have a purpose behind these stories. Drug abuse and the trafficking it causes is as bad as it sounds, and while many might not be aware, it is a concerning and harmful problem to everyone around the world. Indian newspaper headlines roar out with crores worth of heroin raids and tonnes of opium shipments getting captured, the backstory behind which runs deep. Drug abuse is said to be the act of taking excessive amounts of psychoactive or illicit drugs, but why would someone knowingly consume something they know will harm their body right? The answer to that is one reason why people start abusing drugs as minors in their lives.

Drugs usually kickstart a temporary process of elation that relaxes your mind and body by producing feel-good hormones, a feeling that many people are dependent on. Considering this, drug-abusing isn’t something that depends on whether a person is "good or bad".

The path towards drug abuse starts from a variety of factors. It could be the environment one grows up in, their mental health, the life they lead, or the society they have been interacting with. The dependency also involves all these factors.

The trait of habitual dependency and addiction can vary from person to person.

Given the regular stats and the staggering number of dealings that go around the world, the drug trading business is the third-largest industry in the world right now. India alone reports around five million people who are addicted to heroin and these numbers keep increasing and are too fast to develop among teens. And while abusing drugs is big enough a problem itself, it brings forward other problems related to crime and trafficking.

People addicted to drugs often resort to endless crimes to attain them. These result in many drug rackets and human trafficking crimes. A person falls prey to addiction after they start having a high tolerance towards the drug they’re abusing as a result, their brain reduces releasing its hormones by getting dependent on the dopamine released by drugs. It’s an endless vicious cycle that makes a person miserable and harms everyone around them including themselves. The UN reserved 26th June as a day against drug abuse in the year 1989 to honour Lin Zexu's step towards stopping the Opium Trade in Guangdong on June 25th, 1839. It was just before the First Opium War in China.

States like Punjab, Haryana, Manipur, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh are all considered as places where most of these illegal drug-related activities take place in India. However, it isn’t limited. Records show that the numbers keep on multiplying and are mostly increasing among the youth.

The importance behind this day is thus too crucial for the lives of many. It only takes a few attempts for someone to become a forever addict, and helping them can start only by knowing the correct facts. People get robbed of their relationships, become mentally destructive, have hazardous health impacts, and resort to crime and terrible activities for drugs once they have obtained a thrill out of it. This year’s theme aims at fighting down wrong info and spreading correct facts about drug abuse. It is thus a humble request for people to avoid drugs and educate plus help the people in need by hearing them out and comforting them before it’s too late.