Many students have become addicted to LSD and other drugs, sucked into the habit by organised drug-peddling gangs

Vilasitha (not the real name) was at a party in her classmate’s palatial house in Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad. Both were in the Class IX. Her classmate had urged her to come for a “secret party”. When she finally consented, she told herself it would be the first and last time. Now, her classmate offered her a piece of paper, about a square centimetre in size. All she had to do was place it on her tongue.

That piece of paper containing Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), a narcotic drug, changed her mind as it gave her an ‘unusual high of her life’.

“It was wonderful last night. Can I have one more?” Vilasitha later texted the person who had supplied the drug through her classmate.

For her, finding a corner to consume drugs was not a problem. Money was never an issue either. All that she needed was ₹3,000 for a single blot of LSD. Her parents were ever-willing to give more money than she asked for.

The same was the case with Srikar (not the real name), a Class XII student from a top school who wanted to become a doctor. He was training at an institute to go abroad. Children of many bigwigs came there. They partied as well. “He got introduced to a drug peddler at a get-together. He took LSD for fun but became addicted,” an investigator explained. Navneet Kumar (not the real name), a businessman with little time to spare for his kids, was worried about his son’s sliding marks in Class XII. A good school and a conservative upbringing, he had thought, was enough to put his son on the right path. But when he approached a counselling psychologist, C. Veerender, along with his son to seek the reasons for his son Nikhil’s (not the real name) declining academic performance, he was in for a shock. Nikhil was diagnosed with loss of concentration and bouts of strange behaviour. The psychologist found that Nikhil wasn’t just going through a teenage phase, but was into drugs.

Police stumble on ring

It was not just Vilasitha or Srikar or Nikhil. More than a hundred school-going children in Hyderabad have been found neck-deep in drug use in recent months. The situation would have worsened had not the Telangana Prohibition and Excise (P&E) wing stumbled upon what was going on.

It happened by chance, when they came down on the illegal procurement and sale of imported liquor. Eight persons were arrested and it emerged that “something related to narcotic drugs was happening on a large scale”. Having worked as Deputy Commissioner of Police in Hyderabad earlier, Akun Sabharwal, an Inspector General-rank officer now, tapped informants who had helped catch some drug peddlers seven years ago.

Module infiltrated

“Once it was confirmed that narcotic drug sale was rampant in the State capital, we got a couple of our men infiltrated into one module; they pretended to be drug-users,” a top officer of the P&E wing explained. For three weeks, the decoys gathered information about the movements of the peddlers. Simultaneously, other teams began analysing call logs and identifying their locations based on mobile signals. When the gang was ready to deliver ‘medicines’, teams swooped down on them. They caught three and seized 700 blots of LSD and 31 grams of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), popularly known as Ecstasy.

Mobile phones seized from them showed that, “using code words and nicknames, the accused stored data on their clients. We were startled to find schoolchildren to be their customers,” Mr. Sabharwal told The Hindu. Call data records, text and WhatsApp messages confirmed they had a client base of around 1,000.

“It was disturbing to realise that students of 26 well-known schools and 27 colleges, mostly professional colleges, were buying and using drugs,” he said. Teachers, parents, school managements and law-enforcement agencies were embarrassed as newspapers, TV channels and social media reported that students from the city’s reputed schools were taking to drugs. Among the 1,000-odd drug users, over 100 were school-going students while a big group was from colleges.

“A majority of drug-users are from multinational companies, the film industry, star hotels and event management firms,” a police officer said. Most drug peddlers were once consumers.

(With inputs from R. Ravikanth Reddy)