A 27-year-old woman waiting for her husband till 11 pm in the night. The whole day children were crying and waiting for their food. Its lockdown time, for months no proper work. The House owner keeps on pestering for the rent, no creditors left to take loans on interest. At 11 pm in the night, the husband comes home fully drunk, after seeing their father’s condition, the kids ran to their mom in fear. With a feeble voice, the women ask for the money to buy food for her kids. In anger the man smashed his wife; blood covered her face, no one wipes her tears or to take her to the hospital. The hungry kids got up with loud cry and fear. Whom should we blame for this?
A maximum number of homeless people suffer from alcohol addiction. I used to think, these homeless men wantingly came away from home to live on the streets to drink. But I am not right in all the causes. Fifteen years back, I meet a policeman, who cried like a baby at these words. He said to me, Sir I just started drinking for fun once in a while, but now it became part of my life. Even if I want to leave, my body doesn’t cooperate until I drink, I can’t think normally. For this I have been punished by my higher authorities, promotion stopped. I deny my family and their happiness, even though I have a comfortable bed at home but yet I sleep on the roadside like an animal. Poverty preventing my children’s education, society doesn’t respect me or accepts me as a police officer. I don’t know when I will lose my job or my life. Can you help me please? With this ask I went to the higher authority of the Police and explained his condition, took three months of medical leave, and put him in a de-addiction center. After three months, he came out as a new person to live with his family happily.
What do the addicts lose?
- Self-respect: The respect that a person had in society, family, the workplace will be wiped off, due to his habit. Everyone would look at him as a useless person.
- Family: One life, one family would be destroyed only because of the unwanted habits of addiction. The joy of children is taken away, more pressure on the wives. Women struggle alone in feeding kids and in providing basic needs.
- Employment: This habit leads to addiction, soon losing employment.
- Habits: life paten changes, once a respected person but now begging for liquor and food on the streets. No clean clothes, sleeping anywhere and anytime.
- Health: The self-created habit gives shot time enjoyments but kills before time.
- Poor: You make yourself poor by your habits.
Pondicherry being a liquor hub for South Indians and the locals, they easily get entangled to get drunk. Even 12 years old boys get into drugs because they are very much influenced by the cinema stars.
Alcohol abuse is a major public health problem across the globe. Globally, about 50% of the population takes alcohol and about 20% smokes tobacco. Besides alcohol and tobacco, cannabis, heroin, cocaine, sedatives, and various stimulants are used across the globe. In India, various forms of addictive substances such as tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, opium, and opiates, and cough syrups are abused orally and some are used parentally. Tobacco and alcohol abuse is very high in some of the states of Northeast India. Adolescence being the formative period of life, boys and girls start the habit under peer pressure, household influence, parental influence, and by dint of inquisitive mind and experimentation. In many parts of India, including the northeast, alcoholic drinks are prepared in households taking rice as the main ingredient or other available ingredients by fermentation while some people use these alcoholic drinks for religious and social functions. Further, homemade alcoholic drinks are used in front of parents and elders in social functions without inhibition. As such, in most cases, adolescent boys and girls get the taste of alcoholic drinks in the early part of life. They continue intolerable doses; later, some of them shift to commercially available alcoholic drinks, and gradually, they become habitual drinkers or addicts.
Substance abuse is reported to be more in industrial towns. Especially, easy access to illicit substances, available pocket money, and other factors make youth and adolescent boys and girls vulnerable to these habits.
Is it possible to come out of this situation?
Yes, is it possible only for the self-motivated person who really wants to change! By force nothing would work, after some time they would go back to the place where they have been.
It’s huge challenging to work with alcoholic patients but defiantly we need it to save them and their families.
