More than 1.3 million people in Kashmir — roughly one in every ten residents — are dependent on drugs. Most of them on heroin. Most of them young. The age of first use is now eleven. This is what that scale would actually look like if it were happening in your neighborhood.
Each dot represents one person. Roughly 100 of them — one in ten — would be affected by drug abuse. Of those, around 28 would be substance users by clinical definition. About 27 of those 28 would be on heroin specifically. Many would be injecting.
Kensington, Philadelphia is the most-photographed open-air drug market in the United States — described by the New York Times in 2018 as "the Walmart of Heroin." It produces national news coverage, federal task forces, presidential statements. Kashmir's crisis is structurally larger and getting almost no US coverage at all.
A US city the size of Philadelphia (1.55 million people) experiencing Kashmir's prevalence would mean these numbers. To make this concrete: the calculation just applies Kashmir's rates of affected population, heroin dependence, minor users, and daily syringe use to a population of 1.55 million.
If Philadelphia had Kashmir's drug crisis profile, the city would have 10 times as many heroin addicts as Kensington currently has — distributed across the entire city — with effectively no treatment infrastructure. It would not be a national news story. It would be a federal emergency.
"We lost one generation to bullets. We may lose another to drugs."
No single cause produces a crisis at this scale. Kashmir's situation is the product of three overlapping conditions that each, alone, would be serious — and that together produced something nearly unprecedented.
There are two political accounts of why the heroin flow has been so unchecked. Both contain truth. Both are politically self-serving. Both explain part of what's happening — neither fully.
Indian security agencies and pro-government press have framed the crisis as cross-border drug warfare: organized Pakistan-linked networks deliberately flooding Kashmir with heroin to incapacitate the youth as a successor strategy to direct militancy. "The shift from militancy to narcotics is not a retreat; it is a recalibration."
Evidence supporting this: the documented increase in drone drops across the LoC, the role of Punjab-based trafficking networks, the geographic specificity of the crisis to a contested border region.
Kashmiri activists, Pakistani press, and some international observers have argued that the crisis serves the Indian occupation administration's interests by pacifying a population that might otherwise resist. Pointed to: the dramatic expansion of alcohol shops in a previously Muslim-majority low-alcohol region, the comparatively weak enforcement at the Punjab-Kashmir distribution chokepoints.
Evidence supporting this: the chronic underfunding of treatment infrastructure (1 facility per 65,000 affected), the lack of action on known dealers, the regional asymmetry of crackdowns.
Neither framing fully accounts for what's actually happening, and both are politically convenient for the side telling them. The honest reading is that both governments have allowed the population's destabilization for their own ends, neither has prioritized treatment infrastructure proportional to the scale of need, and the people actually paying the price are 11-year-olds initiating heroin use in abandoned buildings. The structural-political analysis matters less than the public-health emergency in front of us — but the political analysis explains why it has been allowed to reach this scale.
In April 2026, J&K Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha launched a 100-day "Nasha Mukt Jammu and Kashmir" (Drug-Free J&K) campaign. He called drug abuse "the most serious challenge facing J&K." The plan includes mass marches, awareness drives, a trafficker crackdown, and limited rehab expansion — 5 districts allocated for de-addiction centres, 20 addiction treatment facilities, 1 integrated rehabilitation centre.
For 1.3 million affected people, that's one treatment facility per 65,000 people in need. Compare: Philadelphia, with roughly 50,000 people with severe opioid use disorder, has dozens of treatment facilities and is still considered to be losing the fight. New York City has hundreds.
At the Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (IMHANS) in Srinagar — the main psychiatric facility in the region — doctors now see 300 to 350 follow-up patients per day, plus 5 to 10 new cases. About 90% of new cases are heroin users, many of them injecting. The facility is overwhelmed by basic numbers. There is no plausible way 20 facilities can absorb 1.3 million affected people, regardless of campaign rhetoric.
Stigma compounds the gap. Per Al Jazeera's reporting, women's rehabilitation in Kashmir is often done secretly because families don't want anyone to know — wealthy families send daughters to other Indian states for treatment, while poorer women suffer silently or delay treatment until it's too late. "These women need compassion, not judgement," one Srinagar clinical psychologist told Al Jazeera. The treatment system, such as it exists, is failing women specifically and the poor generally.
This crisis has near-zero presence in US mainstream media. Al Jazeera covers it. Greater Kashmir, Kashmir Observer, and other regional outlets cover it daily. Indian national press covers it occasionally, usually framed politically. But for US audiences, the Kashmir heroin crisis is functionally invisible.
The reasons follow a pattern your other reading on this site will recognize: conflicts and crises affecting Muslim-majority populations in South Asia receive systematically less coverage than crises affecting white or Christian populations of similar scale. Kashmir is downstream of the same Afghan opium economy that produced the US opioid crisis — which got massive coverage. Kashmir is happening in territory disputed between two nuclear powers. Kashmir's child addiction numbers, by absolute count, exceed those of any single US state's documented under-18 substance use disorder cases. None of this generates US news cycles.
The coverage architecture is also more practical: there are essentially no permanent foreign-correspondent bureaus in Kashmir, partly because of restrictions on foreign press, partly because of declining international news budgets generally. The story doesn't get covered because nobody is there to cover it.
Imagine your city's downtown. Imagine that 10% of everyone walking by you — at the bus stop, in the grocery store, in your kid's school — is dependent on a drug. Imagine the school nurse seeing students initiate heroin at age 11. Imagine the local hospital's psychiatry department seeing 350 follow-up patients daily and 90% of new admissions being for heroin. Imagine 20 treatment facilities for the entire state. Imagine a 100-day government campaign as the official response.
Now imagine that nobody outside the region knows. The national news doesn't run it. Cable doesn't run it. The federal government doesn't declare it an emergency. The president doesn't speak about it. International aid doesn't flow. That is what is happening to Kashmir right now.
The structural causes — geographic proximity to opium production, generational trauma, mass unemployment, political instability, weak treatment infrastructure — are not unique. The combination, at this scale, is. This is among the most severe drug crises documented anywhere in the world right now. It deserves the response we would demand if it were happening to people we recognize.
A senior Kashmiri psychiatrist's line is the line. "We lost one generation to bullets. We may lose another to drugs." Both are true. The world watched the first. It is not watching the second.