IT WAS the lying that proved hardest for Pradeep, a 30-year-old man who has spent the past two years getting off heroin. Whenever he had to leave his family’s house to score, or to nod off somewhere, he had to invent a story. Money was another problem: spending 5,000 rupees ($75) for his daily fix led him to rock bottom due to, as he says in delicate English, “financial disturbance”. He was a shop clerk for 15 years, but after just four months on the needle his savings were gone.

Today Pradeep looks healthy, with a clear gaze and only faint scars on the backs of his hands. Similarly, Maqboolpura, an area of the city of Amritsar shamed in the national press as a den of addicts and widows, appears tranquil: its brick-lined lanes are tidy, with a few cows lowing and no junkies staggering through the dark. But Punjab is suffering from a hidden epidemic of drug abuse. A recent study found that nearly 20% of the state’s young men use opioids—and not just the traditional poppy husks. P.D. Garg, a psychiatrist who has been treating Punjab’s drug addicts for years, says that injectable heroin appeared five years ago, and quickly became the drug of choice.

Why Punjab more than other states? Theories abound. Many point to the border with Pakistan, over whose territory Afghan heroin flows. But Punjab’s demand has outpaced that supply. Heroin now also arrives from Rajasthan to the south, while synthetic opioid painkillers creep in from the east. The state bears economic and psychological scars from its agriculture crisis. In the 1960s the green revolution made Punjab rich. It invested in education and infrastructure. But as the state’s water table fell and farming grew more mechanised, jobs in the cities failed to materialise. Today Punjab’s per-capita GDP is middling by Indian standards. Gursharan Singh Kainth, an economist, reckons the state needs an “agro-industrial revolution” to provide better jobs for young men.

The local head of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules Punjab together with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), says nonsensically that drug use will cease “if honour increases”. The SAD contradicts itself brazenly: it has denied the scale of the state’s drugs problem, while at the same time boasting of how many treatment clinics it has opened. Punjabi voters have had enough: the upstart reformists of the Aam Aadmi Party won their first parliamentary seats in Punjab two years ago. Expect the squabbling to grow fiercer as the 2017 elections draw nearer.

A new film, “Udta Punjab”, dramatises the state’s struggles with drugs in a brutal, electrifying 148 minutes. One subplot draws a parallel with the real-life case of a convicted drug lord who named the SAD deputy chief’s brother-in-law as his accomplice (the brother-in-law, a state minister, says the accusations are baseless and politically motivated). In the film, a subtle old Sikh villain dismisses his state’s future with a Punjabi couplet—“The lands are dry and the kids are high”—and a shrug. Punjabis say the film feels true to life.

The film nearly missed its release date of June 17th: India’s film board demanded 89 cuts, including every reference to Punjab. But at the last minute, the Bombay High Court intervened, ruling that just a single shot of a pop star urinating from the stage had to go. The overruled censor was appointed by the BJP, whose coalition partner in Punjab, the SAD, had much to lose from bad publicity.

Pradeep says he would like to see the film. But he says that these days he is far too busy, working 13 hours a day, making up for lost time.