| | | Eight years ago, Muralitharan had won several intercollegiate long jump medals, and his sports career appeared poised for a leap to the national stage. Then a friend at the local college offered the young athlete a marijuana joint — ostensibly, to help boost his stamina. Before he knew it, Muralitharan was skipping visits to the sports grounds and instead rushing to a nearby fishermen’s village to buy cannabis. He eventually started using heroin too, and now he cannot spend a day without snorting it. | | I feel normal only when I sniff heroin. - Thiyash Muralitharan* | | “I feel normal only when I sniff heroin,” he told OZY. “I become violent when I don’t.” His mother, Murugan Sudarshini, who sells local delicacies at a streetside stall, has had to bear the brunt of his anger. “Earlier, I used to keep cash away from him so that he wouldn’t be able to buy drugs, but he physically assaulted me a few times when I refused to pay,” said Sudarshini, who now often ends up giving Muralitharan 1,500 Sri Lankan rupees (about $4) to buy a gram of heroin. “I have no option but to give in.” Muralitharan’s addiction reflects a deeper challenge. The Northern Province, which witnessed a 26-year civil war — between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — that killed over 100,000 people, is struggling with drug abuse. As per the latest government data, in 2019, the province recorded 12,139 cannabis users and 728 heroin users, as compared to 7,608 cannabis users and 487 heroin users in 2018. These regional numbers are just a fraction of Sri Lanka's national numbers, which show that an estimated 301,898 people smoke cannabis while 92,540 use heroin. Overall, about 2.5% of the national population above the age of 14 consumes narcotics either regularly or occasionally. But what’s worrying about the Northern Province is that it traditionally had lower drug use rates than other parts of the country, yet witnessed a dramatic 59% year-on-year increase in cannabis users and a 49% rise in heroin users between 2018 and 2019. And while there’s no data from the past two years yet, signs on the ground point to a deepening crisis. |
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| | | | | | | Mid-Sea High Apart from cannabis and heroin, methamphetamine lands in Sri Lanka’s north via the Palk Strait, the narrow strip of water separating the country from India, according to a police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Coastal areas, including Jaffna, Mannar and Vavuniya, are major drug trafficking hubs in the north. Kandasami Rajachandran, president of the Ambal Fishermen’s Cooperative in Jaffna’s Karainagar, told OZY that Indian fishermen and traffickers who arrive in boats and trawlers bring these drugs halfway across the Palk Strait, where they pass them on to Sri Lankan fishermen and drug traffickers in the middle of the sea. Rajachandran said that when the Sri Lankan navy chases local traffickers, they dump packets stuffed with the drugs into the sea. The traffickers “trace them later with the help of GPS trackers attached to the drug packets,” he added. Sri Lankan police spokesperson Nihal Thalduwa confirmed to OZY that traffickers get the drugs through a mid-sea transfer. But he clarified that not all the traffickers are fishermen. | | Meth helped me stay focused but then I realized that I was becoming violent if I didn’t take it. - Sajith | | According to the Handbook of Drug Abuse Information 2021 released by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defense, 97,416 persons were arrested for drug-related offenses in 2020. Of these, 11,690 are from the Northern Province. That’s 12% of total arrests even though the province accounts only for 5% of the national population. Thalduwa said that several factors, such as shallow waters, long coastal stretches and numerous fishing boats densely parked close to the sea, make these transactions across the Palk Strait hard to stop. “Traffickers have the opportunity to park their boats in the beaches in several sparsely populated areas of the north without anyone noticing them,” he said. After arriving on shore, the drugs reach schools and colleges, targeting young men. Media reports suggest that ice cream vendors often sell mava, an areca nut-based drug in the form of chewing gum, to school children. Thalduwa said that police raids have found some fast-food joints and stationery shops adjacent to schools also selling mava. M Jeyarasa, a mental health officer at the Kilinochchi district hospital, which is about 70 kilometers (43 miles) away from Jaffna, told OZY that, while alcoholism among youth was once the biggest concern of many families, more and more parents have started complaining about drug abuse among their children. “Often, school principals and teachers seek help for their students,” Jeyarasa said. Last year, a school teacher in Jaffna was assaulted by a group of students when he criticized their alleged drug abuse. Over 300 people have been identified as drug addicts over the past three years in the state-run drug de-addiction clinic at Kilinochchi, Jeyarasa added. Rev. Vincent Patrick, the director of a Jaffna-based de-addiction and rehabilitation center run by a Catholic nonprofit, Change Charity Trust, told OZY that at least 15 young men in the age group of 16-27 years are undergoing treatment there at any given point. “Many are from educated families,” Patrick, also an anthropologist, said. “They start taking drugs because it’s a fad.” Sajith, a 24-year-old computer engineer who spent over two months at Patrick’s de-addiction center in Jaffna, told OZY that he first took to marijuana because he felt it made him “creative.” In March, he started taking methamphetamine as an alternative to Ritalin — an imported medicine he used previously to treat his attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — which became unobtainable during Sri Lanka's economic crisis. “Meth helped me stay focused but then I realized that I was becoming violent if I didn’t take it. That’s when I sought help,” Sajith told OZY. |
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| | | | | | | | Kevin Jenushen*, a 20-year-old daily wage earner who regularly uses both cannabis and heroin, remained unsupervised in his early teens because his mother, a single parent of three children and nursing assistant at a local government hospital, was busy at work. Jenushen got addicted to heroin three years ago when he was working as a fisherman — he wanted to earn to support his family — while attending college. He eventually dropped out. “Some of my college friends also got addicted to drugs while they went to the sea for fishing,” Jenushen told OZY. Jenushen’s story is sadly common. Sypherion Thileepan, director of Shanthiham, a nonprofit that provides counseling and skills training to war-affected families, told OZY that in many families in the north, mothers are the primary breadwinners because men either disappeared or were killed during the war. That leaves children with less parental supervision, and more vulnerability. Ambiga Sritharan, director of the Jaffna-based nonprofit Law and Human Rights Centre, which provides pro bono legal assistance to families of war victims, said that post-war trauma also left many families “dysfunctional,” pushing adolescents toward addictive substances. But Thalduwa claimed that the police’s awareness programs in schools and colleges, aimed at preventing youth drug abuse, have helped. Meanwhile, Sudarshini has convinced her son Muralitharan to visit Patrick’s de-addiction center. She has also convinced him to go to a nearby sports field every evening. I cannot do long jumps anymore, but I love to play cricket,” Muralitharan said. “My body, however, has lost the strength that a sportsperson needs.” *Some names have been changed at the request of people who spoke with OZY but wanted anonymity. |
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