ACROSS from Peshawar’s bustling Karkhano Market, along an abandoned railway track, people sit in a long row under the shade of a concrete wall. Dishevelled, unkempt and clad in greasy rags, they sit in huddled groups, covering themselves with pieces of cloth. A little further, on a road leading to the Peshawar Industrial Estate, a large number of similarly down-on-their-luck men are congregating on the bed of a nullah under a culvert, smoking and injecting heroin.

Locally called the ‘powderis’, these heroin addicts have gradually turned Karkhano Market, once notorious for the easy availability of smuggled goods, into a drug addicts’ paradise.

“Drug addicts from places as far as Punjab come here to due to the easy availability of drugs,” said Nusrat Shah, a drug addict from the Tehkal area of the city. Shah and countless others like him engage in rag-picking, begging and even theft in order to be able to satisfy their fatal cravings.

Karkhano abuts Jamrud tehsil of Khyber Agency, which is one of the main transit routes of contraband smuggled into Peshawar and beyond. It attracts a large number of drug addicts from across the province and elsewhere. According to locals, Jamrud tehsil’s Wazir Dhand market was the epicentre of drug smuggling. “A couple of years ago, all sorts of drugs were on sale here in open, but now the business has gone underground,” a local told Dawn.

All this is taking place under the very nose of the Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF), which claims to play a “strategic role in the fight against drugs”. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ANF directorate is located a stone’s throw from here. The ANF did not offer comments for this story.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report on drug use in Pakistan for 2013 notes that this province has the highest prevalence of drug use in Pakistan, with 10.9 per cent of the adult population using. However, for its part, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government seems to be oblivious of how drug abuse is tearing society apart.

It has no statistics, policy or rehabilitation strategy at hand to tackle drug abuse. There is no coordination between various government entities tasked with drugs control. No one is going after the drug barons and peddlers, belying the tall claim of a “drug free Pakistan by 2020” as espoused in the Drug Abuse Control Master Plan 2010-2014, prepared by the ministry of narcotics control.

Under Section 52 of the Control of Narcotics Substance Act (CNSA) 1997, the provincial government bears the responsibility of registering all drug addicts in its jurisdiction. But it has no accurate figures, and it has also failed to set up the required number of detoxification and rehabilitation centres to treat the growing number of addicts. An official of the provincial social welfare department told Dawn that they have a single detoxification and rehabilitation centre with a capacity of over about 30 people in the provincial capital; another one, he says, is currently being built.

Following the repeal back in 2010 of the West Pakistan Vagrancy Ordinance 1958, the social welfare department has no legal cover for detaining beggars and addicts. “We cannot take drug addicts in custody, even if we wished to,” the official said.

In 2015, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government launched a project to treat about 4,000 drug addicts at the cost of some Rs150 million. The project was outsourced to the Dost Welfare Foundation that specialises in drug addicts’ rehabilitation. Mr Azazuddin, a representative for Dost, says that they have so far treated about 6,000 people during the 30-month-long project, ending on June 2017. Dost has facilities to treat over 600 patients; however, due to the paucity of resources they are currently treating about 150 only.

Mr Azaz says that the rehabilitation of drug addicts is a difficult process. “They are not ordinary criminals to put into jails, but require rehabilitation, which needs time and money as well as willingness on the part of patient,” he said.

The city police also blame the Khyber Agency administration for failing to control drug peddling. “The police cannot cross into Jamrud to dismantle drug peddlers’ business or stop all these people from going there,” a police official said. He added that not a single person from the settled area was peddling drugs in Karkhano; it was all coming from the other side.

As government departments are mired in insensitivity and inattention, the families living in the area are anxious about the impact of the problem on their children. “I worry for my children as they come across drug addicts on a daily basis,” said Asad Ali, a resident of the nearby Labour Colony.

The dusty environs of Karkhano, and its denizens, are stark reminders of Pakistan’s lost war on drugs — it dragged on until it ceased to appear a problem to either the state and citizens. The addicts trapped in a nightmarish cycle of craving are a small part of the dark underbelly of this bourgeoning city which is itself trapped in a vicious struggle between life and death. They even fail to evoke the sympathy of their fellow citizens.

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2017