ONE MILLION DEAD JUNKIES CAN'T BE WRONG!
how it all started, out of curiosity. But later it was something that gave me a different high so I continued with my other friends who were around the same age as I was. It all seems super fun when you start. But the actual problems start a little later and that’s when you come to realise you are already hooked on to it and start taking the easier ways out in life. For example, giving reasons like, “I can’t study any more”, and dropping out of college and various other things.
I was indeed very lucky that my parents found out about my problem at a nascent stage and decided to act on it in a very mature, understanding and loving way. It was tough love at first when they put me in a rehabilitation centre, where I found my mentor and role model Rev. Fr. Joe Pereira.
After over two-and-a-half years of being clean, I am today a recreational triathlete. I qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championship and will be sharing the privilege of being one of the four flag-bearers for India in Chattanooga, Tennessee (USA) where the race is supposed to happen on September 10.
As for legalising marijuana, one positive outcome is that it might be helpful to a certain category of cancer patients to relieve their pain. We are talking about roughly 0.09 per cent of the population, which falls in that category. In my opinion, all the current political decisions are business-driven and are meant to help certain people who fall in the high socio-economic category.
If at all this law gets through and marijuana is legalised, there’s a high chance that doctors will start exploiting the situation to give prescriptions to people for financial benefit.
It’s next to impossible that legalising it will stop drug-peddling. Demand for this plant is very high and not everyone will have the privilege of getting it legally through some doctor. So drug-peddling will certainly continue.
If marijuana is legalised, the whole mindset of parents who currently think it is wrong for their children to smoke will change over time and they will be more lenient if they find out their children are doing it. Multiple studies have suggested that use of marijuana over the years has only negative effects on the user. No one gets smart or super brainy by smoking it. On the contrary, studies show that people tend to get slow and dumb with regular and prolonged use. I can vouch for this from personal experience — starting to smoke weed is the first step towards trying harder drugs. Not everyone gets hooked on to them like I did. But quite a few do. So, why jeopardise the whole nation by legalising marijuana for the sake of a small percentage of the population (say cancer patients who are in their last stages)? There are other ways of reducing pain. (Neil D’silvha is a recovering drug addict. He is a recreational triathlete, who qualified for the Ironman 70.3 World Championship. He is one of the four flag-bearers for India in Chattanooga, Tennessee (USA), where the race will be run on September 10.)
a group of teenagers from San Rafael, San Francisco, started meeting after school at 4.20 pm to smoke pot. The habit spread, and 420 became a code word for potheads across the world to meet for some “high” time.
Addiction is a very slow, cunning, baffling and powerful disease that has the ability to destroy lives across socio-economic backgrounds. I was one of the victims of addiction and am now a recovered addict for the past two years. I currently work with the Muktangan Mitra Centre as a counsellor. Anonymity is one of the main aspects of the NA (Narcotics Anonymous) programme.
Coming to Union Minister Maneka Gandhi’s suggestion about legalising marijuana for medical purposes, I feel that India is not yet ready for such a drastic step. The youth makes up 65 per cent of India’s population. Marijuana is already easily available and hence many are getting easily hooked on to it. Marijuana also is a “gateway drug” and that increases the chances of an individual trying out many other drugs.
When I talk to young people at Muktangan Mitra who are admitted for marijuana abuse, they often ask why marijuana is not legal in India when it is legal in many western countries. The answer is that we are not literate enough to know the illeffects that marijuana can cause to our brain.
I’d like to know what marijuana is going to be adding to or substituting for in medical treatment. What diseases is it aiming to cure? Cancer? I’m assuming that the use of marijuana will be primarily for dealing with pain. However, medicine has progressed and is progressing to such an extent that I’m sure there are far better and more effective drugs that can be used to control pain, as for instance, morphine. There is also hydromorphone, methadone, oxycodone, and tramadol, and many other such drugs for pain reduction. So, why do we need a medicinal/recreational drug like marijuana to deal with or cure cancer? Moreover, is there a guarantee that people won’t use it for recreational purposes under the pretext of medicinal use? We have approximately two per cent cancer patients in India and we cannot jeopardise the future of the youth that comprises 65 per cent of the population, who will celebrate legalising marijuana in India because being an addict in the past, that’s what I secretly wished for.
I was an addict for six years and I had multiple addictions — marijuana, hashish, cocaine, meth, MDMA, LSD, and other hallucinating drugs. They helped me in that moment to escape reality because they provided me with a different reality that I chose to be in because I did not want to face the reality that life was then providing me.
Marijuana mainly provided me with this escape into a different world that was fascinating and all I ever wanted was to stay in that high all my life. All I could think of was how I could grow my own marijuana and sell it and get others high so that they could experience what I was experiencing. This made me go to Manali and visit the farmers there who cultivated marijuana. I would smoke a lot of marijuana with them and eventually got hooked on to it. Money at this point played a huge role because I was still a teenager and was not earning at all, so sustaining my highs was getting costly. As pocket money was not sufficient, this led me to gambling and all kinds of illegal activities that would eventually jeopardise my future and put me behind bars. However, I never understood this back then because THC, a chemical in marijuana — be it medicinal or adulterated — causes permanent damage to an individual’s cognitive functions, with irreversible damage to memory and learning abilities over a period of time.
Memory impairment from marijuana use occurs because THC alters how the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory formation, processes information.
Most of the evidence supporting this assertion comes from animal studies. For example, rats exposed to THC in utero, soon after birth, or during adolescence, show notable problems with specific learning/memory tasks later in life. (Abhijit Kakad is a model, former drug addict and counsellor, who helps people quit drugs at the Muktangan Mitra Centre.)