Drug addiction among women in the city is on the rise. There is a need to reverse the trend
In an hideous cottage in Byculla’s patra chawl, the hub of bag manufacturers, 42-year-old Rita sits lonely in her claustrophobic cubicle, chasing dreams — or what most people would call brown sugar. It’s late afternoon and just the time for a quick fix. Rita’s husband is away at work. Her seven-year-old son may be troubled by her mother’s moods, but is too young to know what’s happening.
Rita has been taking drugs for 18 years. She is among the many women misusing substances from alcohol to drugs, and among those who have started seeking help to deal with the problem. With women having taken to cigarettes in a big way in the last decade, their use of narcotics has also increased.
Like most addicts, Rita took to drugs via the most common but underestimated gateways — liquor and cigarettes. And like almost everyone with a substance-abuse problem, she never thought she’d get addicted — “getting hooked,” she thought, was something that happened to others.
Hashish smoker Sonali, a 36-year-old mechanical engineer in Mumbai, had started smoking for a lark too. When her software programmer boyfriend Sanjay introduced her to cannabis, little did they know that the drug — known as a soft drug — had a dangerous reputation for severe latent mental illnesses.
“In the beginning, it felt great. We’d smoke pot and go out dancing, feeling intensely bonded,” says Sanjay. The downside, he adds, showed up soon enough. Sanjay noticed a marked sense of quiet and disconnectedness in Sonali. She started talking about hearing eerie voices and suspected that conspiracies were being hatched against her. Within six months, she had ended up as a case of full blown schizophrenia.
Cannabis, psychiatrists warn, also has disastrous effects on motivation levels. It is a damage that is hard to reverse. While physicians advocate complete abstinence from even milder drugs such as cannabis, it is a strong no-no for people with personality disorders and a family history of alcoholism and drug use.
Women pick up the habit for different reasons. Some do it out of loneliness, some because of peer pressure. Haseena Khan, a member of Awaz-e-Niswaan, an organisation that works for Muslim women’s rights, says she knows of cases where men have persuaded their wives to take up drugs in a bid to improve their sex lives.
There are other reasons as well. Mumbai-based Rehana was introduced to brown sugar in the early 1980s as a drug that would help her lose weight. She did shed 15 kilograms, but remained under the spell of the drug for well over a decade. “I did not know it was a narcotic substance,” she says.
The substance of abuse ranges from prescription medicines such as cough syrups and tranquillisers to alcohol, cannabis or hard drugs. It cuts across all sections of women, but the abuse of medication is most common among Muslim women living in Muslim-dominated areas such as Mohammedali Road, Dongri, Byculla, Mumbra and Bhiwandi, in and around Mumbai. Abusing medicines is one way of bypassing social and religious taboo on alcohol and tobacco.
For instance, 36-year-old Ruhi was addicted to sleeping pills for about 20 years. She picked up the habit as a young bride, after being offered what she thought was an innocuous looking sedative by her mother-in-law to help her curb sleeplessness. Until a month ago, when she was admitted to a rehabilitation centre, Ruhi’s daily dose of pills hovered around 30-40 pills a day. To avoid the suspicion of chemists, she used to purchase the pills from three medical shops in the Byculla locality. On some days, she’d visit a neighbouring hospital chemist for more potent pills.
The abuse of sleeping pills was highlighted on Friendship Day on August 6, when two female students of a Mumbai college fell unconscious after having allegedly popped some 14 pills each. And it is not uncommon to find women on pills that even function normally at work. If pill poppers manage to stay alive despite the huge strain on the body, it’s because the body learns to adapt to the medication.
A women tried to attack their families with knives when refused money for their addiction, but, who remember nothing of it a day later.
The family, of course, is often the first casualty of abuse. Ruhi’s marriage broke many years ago, leaving her teenage children unsettled. Asha, a 36-year-old alcohol and drug addict from city’s western suburb, says her son and daughter are addicted to stronger stuff like cocaine and brown sugar. Things are not well between Sonali and Sanjay either. “Our relationship has been damaged by her suspicious nature,” says Sanjay.
Rita is still lucky. Her husband, being a former victim of drugs, is more understanding. But her son, who’s had to be sent off to a boarding school to shield him from her mother’s addiction, is a big loser. “He doesn’t know what I use, but when he sees me too far gone, he says, ‘Mummy doesn’t take that’,” says Rita.
