The day that my son was to leave to start college was nearing. 400 km away from home, he was all set to begin life as a hostelite at a prestigious campus after having been a fairly sheltered middle-class boy in Bengaluru. “Should I tell him now?” I had struggled with myself the day before.
Finally, while packing his sports bag, it happened. “Listen, you know that I am not a micro-manager type to call every day, ask where you are, who you are with. We all trust you. But tell me something that comforts me so that I do not worry even when I hear all sorts of things…students falling for drugs in hostels...”
“Amma,” he smiled calmly, “do you really think that I haven’t seen all that already around me in school life? When you used to drop me for football near Bharat’s place? The guy in the corner, you think he used to sell only samosas? And that excursion all of us went to…If I had to succumb, it didn’t need me this long, Ma.”
Aryan Khan, 23, and son of India’s star supremo Shahrukh Khan, is not the first young man to come under the drugs cloud. But if you were to go by the thousands of news clips, posts and WhatsApp forwards this week that spilt over with sarcasm, scoldings and parenting advice, you would imagine drugs happen only to kids of film stars or very rich dads.
Reality check: Only two weeks ago, narcotics sleuths in Karnataka busted a gang that was into ‘door delivery’ of ganja (also known by names like marijuana, weed, bhang, charas, dope, cannabis), a chain that also involved food delivery boys. In 2020, a 10-city survey done by the renowned AIIMS, covering nearly 6,000 students, found that one in 14 students had used some or the other substance (inhalants, ganja, alcohol, tobacco) the preceding year.
The hard truth: No strata of society is spared the drug menace. Rural, rich, poor, those on streets, from broken families, those in happy homes – all are vulnerable, some more than others. And every person deserves rehabilitation and society’s support, equally.
As long as it is happening to someone else, drugs is a scandal. If it touches our loved ones, that’s when we realise it is a struggle. Those people who think it doesn’t happen to “people like us” -- do they even talk to their own young at home?
Turns out they don’t. “Indian parents find three topics very tough to discuss with their children: sex, drugs, mental health issues.” This, coming from teen health specialist and parenting coach Dr H S Anuradha, who has been seeing troubled teenagers for over two decades, should tell us how deep the problem is.
The parents of the present generation believe, on the one hand, in giving their children whatever they ask for. Since they have the spending power that their parents didn’t, their kids get toys, games, designer outfits, destination holiday -- on just asking. Or ordering, via phone. The surprising fallout for a have-everything person is: not being satisfied by anything.
This discontent, that Anuradha senses in most young people today, doesn’t find an outlet. To add to that is the exposure via social media to the lives of the glamorous, the ‘normalisation’ of alcohol and use of weed, etc., in parties they go to, and the pressure to fit in. This pressure must be far more for the rich and famous.
Also, in some countries, like say Canada or Jamaica, it is legal to smoke up. Young people, Anuradha says, struggle when in places like these, initially wanting to be cool with it, and very soon unable to deal with the deadly repercussions of drug use.
And yet, most often when they fall into this trap, all they get from elders at home is lecture, advice, shame. They are talked down to, not talked with – so they would rather not share at all, and fall more into the same abyss.
The key is to not condemn or crucify, but the converse. The key is to be receptive parents, coaches, teachers who are willing to listen. Whether Aryan Khan actually did drugs is left to the cops and the court. Ours is not to throw stones, our own house is made of glass. And all our young just as breakable.