The age of haze: From weed to vaping, how our school kids are getting stoned today
Drug cartels have set their eyes on our teens today, and these young students are increasingly vulnerable to substance abuse, owing to peer pressure and parental neglect.
“We hid it in our phone covers and then went to the school’s football field and had it,” said the 15-year-old Delhi boys.
No, they were not talking about a forbidden snack or even a cigarette. They were instead narrating how they smoked marijuana in the school premises, during school hours.
If this shocks you, be prepared — this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The generation of “drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” from the 1960s pales in comparison to the generation of students today, barely in their teens, on the intake of drugs and alcohol.
Over 30 schools in the capital are on the radar of drug cartels — business is done only where there is profit. In one of those schools, a student in class 10 once overdosed at a party and was absent for months. Another one died after ‘od’ing — as “overdosing” is commonly referred to.
A teacher told a student from yesteryears, “During your time, when kids were huddled in a corner, they were deciding how to bunk a class. Now if kids disappear in a group, it is because they are going to smoke a joint behind the generator.”
Walking through a park in broad daylight in a posh Delhi locality, a friend may have mistaken herself to be in Amsterdam, after she saw, or rather, smelled four school-going kids smoking up. It is as open now as this.
Today's teens have embraced a lifestyle that promises them the stars — quite literally. The most popular four-letter words are now either 'weed' or 'hash'. The high comes cheap and the quality of the contraband? Immaterial. Add to this a bit of sneaked alcohol from open bars at home, and the joyride of highs is scary to think of.
The ‘Breezer’, you ask? That is as last century as smoking a cigarette — which most teens think is lame and belongs to their parents' generation. Today’s school-going kids have even managed to make millennials look like fossils.
Let us not be delusional that only troubled kids are into substance abuse. Peer pressure — to not be mocked as an outsider — is so enormous that even the “good” kids with high grades give in, just to remain ‘cool’.
You can quit fretting about what is considered the most abused toy in the teen’s hand — the mobile phone. Instead, now meet 'JUUL' — the new favourite teen accessory — the nicotine-tinged electronic cigarette that resembles computer flash drives. This ‘pen’ can be used discreetly anywhere — students admit that many senior school students carry these in their uniform pockets. If they get confiscated, these are easy to replace — you can buy them online along with the marijuana oil that has substituted tobacco in the Indian vaping twist.
The Health Ministry is aware of this burgeoning evil and is urging states to ban its manufacturing and sales.
The contrabands come in all shapes and sizes — and it may sometimes be easy to miss the signs.
Do parents know? “Only if the kid is stupid,” is the frequent response.
But the reality is that many new-age parents themselves are complicit — some introduce kids to alcohol even at their child’s 15th birthday! Their rationale? Kids are going to have it anyway. By introducing it, we may as well control the intake.
However, living in denial is not going to lead us anywhere. The common parental refrain of “My kid is a good kid” is laughable when pitched against peer pressure.
Outside one of Delhi’s oldest schools, innocuous-looking cartoon stickers are being sold — stick your tongue out, the peddler swipes it and moves on. The first swipe is free. For the second, and every subsequent time, the kids have to pay. If pocket money is not enough, the kids resort to petty crimes. A child psychologist warns that kids — as young as in class 7 — are now in rehab for sniffing glues, whiteners and boot polish. If everything else to get a high fails, kids in the NCR are now being adventurous enough to cultivate marijuana, the psychologist avers.
Many of us grew up envious of infamous post-graduation parties in Mexico’s Cabo. But we now have our own Indian 2.0 version — plane-loads of students head to Goa after giving their class 12 board exams where they transition from weed and hash to “hard” stuff like synthetic drugs. “Nothing is lame. Not even weed,” says a youngster. “It is just the stepping stone to harsher stuff,” she adds. She was recently at a party where young men — barely in their 20s — were sitting on the floor, snorting cocaine.
A lost generation is a direct product of parents trying to substitute money for the time they ought to be spending with children.
In the words of a student, “We are not a generation of degenerates — it is just that the party culture has changed, and open drinks and clubbing now begin from class 10.”
Get bored and get stoned — that’s the mantra for the kids today. The parents alone can pull them back from the brink. However, for that, they first have to remember how to be a parent. Organising a child’s alcohol parties in class 9 is just pure claptrap.