Easy access, rising addiction: The new face of Northeast’s drug problem

Oyan (Arunachal Pradesh), Jonai (Assam): In 2017, Yano (name changed) was a Class IX student in Pasighat, Arunachal Pradesh, when a group of friends offered her something they promised would deliver an “intense high”. Curious, she smoked the brownish substance inside a small tobacco tin. Without a second thought, she handed over Rs 500 to a peddler. She had no idea that the first puff would mark the beginning of a years-long battle with addiction.

Within days, Yano’s craving became overwhelming. Desperate for another hit, she started searching for the peddler. To her, brown sugar was simply a “foreign” drug unlike kani (opium), the narcotic she had grown up hearing about.

For the next three years, until the Covid-19 pandemic, she was hooked on brown sugar—the impure, street form of heroin, often mixed with adulterants. Around 2020, she graduated to “a whitish powder that looked like Horlicks”— a far more potent and expensive drug. It was heroin, and this time she was injecting it.


Today, at 24, Yano has left narcotics be - hind after two rounds of residential treatment at a rehabilitation centre in Yingkiong, a town in Upper Siang district. Unemployed and estranged from her mom and two sisters, she is rebuilding her life.

“I am a recovering warrior,” she says with confidence. That phrase is more than a personal affirmation. It is also the name of a civil society group she has recently joined. Recovering Warriors is an yet to be registered organisation in Oyan, a small town in Arunachal Pradesh, about 12 km north of Murkongselek, the last railway station in north Assam and a lo - cality widely regarded as a hotspot for drug trafficking.

Yano has a single mission: to ensure that the young do not walk the dark path that once consumed her.

DRUG ROUTE

Once viewed largely as a transit route for narcotics from the Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, Northeast India is now confronting a far more troubling reality: its own people are taking drugs. Arunachal Pradesh—particularly the districts along the Siang River (known as the Brahmaputra in Assam)—has also been drawn into the crisis, although it lies outside the principal drug trafficking corridor that runs through Myanmar, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam and Tripura.

The scale of trafficking underscores the magnitude of the challenge. Last year, narcotics agencies arrested 116 traffickers across the Northeast and seized drugs worth about Rs 665 crore.

It’s believed that these seizures are only the tip of the iceberg, and that a far larger volume of narcotics is slipping through the region’s borders.

Across the country, in 2025, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) seized 133,965 kg of narcotic drugs, with an estimated street value of Rs 2,000 crore. Also, 265 offenders, including nine foreigners, were convicted, underscoring both the transnational nature of the trade and the intensifying enforcement efforts against it.

The arrest of two Myanmar-based drug kingpins—Thancintuang, better known as Chintuang, in Delhi in May, and Nengzatuan alias Tuanpi in Manipur’s Churachandpur earlier this week exposed the layers of a sophisticated cross border trafficking network. Investigators say the syndicate supplied methampheta - mine and heroin from Myanmar to India through the Northeast, using an elaborate supply chain that stretched across the international border. According to NCB’s estimates, the illicit trafficking network anchored by Chintuang alone is valued at Rs 115 crore.

PATH OF RECOVERY

Earlier this month, ET met more than a dozen former drug users along the Assam Arunachal Pradesh border to understand how they were drawn into addiction, what it took to break free and how life changed from the depths of dependence to the difficult journey of recovery. They spoke candidly about the nexus between peddlers and users, the changing drugs landscape, the shifting prices of narcotics and the ease with which they are available.

The most disturbing takeaway is this: heroin has become alarmingly accessible across the belt. Former users say addiction has driven many to sell whatever they own—including family farmland—to finance their next hit. When they run out of possessions, some even turn to loot, trapped in a cycle of craving and dependence.

The stories are as diverse as they are unsettling. Among those who spoke to this writer are graduates and postgraduates, a 46-year-old employee of Assam’s education department, a former accountant at a tea estate owned by the son of a former Arunachal Pradesh chief minister, and a man from Arunachal who says he “graduated from brown sugar to heroin” while pursuing a master’s degree in tourism in Shillong a few years ago.

Many describe themselves as poly-drug users. Their descent into addiction began with cannabis before progressing to brown sugar and, eventually, heroin.

“I switched to heroin because I wanted to prove to myself that I was smarter,” recalls one of them. “I had also convinced myself that heroin would work as an aphrodisiac.” The switch came at a steep price. “When I was taking brown sugar, Rs 4,000 a week was enough. But after I shifted to heroin, I needed around Rs 1,500 every day,” he says. The father of six-year-old twins, he has not touched drugs in the last two years of recovery.

The Assam government employee offers a glimpse into the mechanics of the drug trade. “Drugs don’t reach Jonai directly from Myanmar,” he says, referring to the Assam town that borders Arunachal Pradesh. “Consignments first reach distributors in larger hubs like Guwahati. If someone in Jonai places an order worth Rs 50,000-100,000, a peddler delivers it.”

According to him, the trade runs entirely on cash. Peddlers, he says, are often local residents who have “good connections” with distributors and brokers in the supply chain. The nature of the transaction is simple. “A first time buyer might call a peddler and say, ‘I’m waiting near such and such hotel, wearing a yellow T-shirt.’ Money changes hands, drugs are delivered, that’s it.

The ease and informality of the exchange, he says, have made narcotics remarkably accessible, even in small towns away from the international frontier.

Another recovering user from Arunachal Pradesh, a 35-year-old with two school-going daughters, says users in the region distinguish between two varieties of brown sugar. One, he says, is significantly more potent and is known as pagla (mad) brown sugar. “Once you take it, you lose control over yourself,” he says. “You don’t know what you are doing. People have assaulted others, committed robberies and there have been cases of users dying in road accidents while driving under its influence.”

He says addiction had distorted his sense of reality. “I became convinced that my wife was having an affair,” he recalls. “It was my imagination but it triggered constant arguments and nearly destroyed my family.”

ADDICTION TO REHAB

For many who are battling addiction, recovery begins not in a rehabilitation centre but at home. Family support, says Tapir Darang, chief adviser to the All Arunachal AntiDrugs Warriors, is often the most important factor in helping a user break free from the grip of narcotics.

“The biggest problem is families that are trying to hide someone’s addiction,” he says. “If they are unwilling to cooperate or seek help for the victim, we reach out to the clan chief. Their intervention can make a difference. It is important to get the user into a rehab centre.”

Darang says grassroots organisations are stepping in where families and institutions fall short. Among them is Recovering Warriors in Oyan, which he says is at the forefront of the fight against drug abuse in the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border belt.

Founded only last year, the organisation has conducted anti-drug awareness programmes in 24 villages while also participating in flood relief operations. Its president, Mohan Tamut, believes recovery is about much more than detoxification.

“It is important for former drug users to have a community they can call their own,” says Tamut. “They play football, volleyball and badminton together. Quitting narcotics is never easy and staying away is even harder. Unless they re - main connected and support one another, the risk of relapse is always there.”

INVOKING TRIBAL LAWS

In Wokha, in neighbouring Nagaland a district that lies outside the conventional narcotics trafficking route from Myanmar—a group of young Lotha Nagas has adopted an unconventional strategy to combat the drug menace.

Convinced that the criminal justice system alone cannot stem the crisis, they have turned to tribal laws to deal with traffickers and users alike.

“If we rely only on the law, Wokha will never become a drug-free district,” says the organisation’s president, who previously worked in the field of cyber law and has requested anonymity. “After consulting the village elders, we decided to invoke our customary laws. Our approach is simple: rehabilitate users and expel peddlers.

Repeat offenders are required to sign a written undertaking that they will never return to narcotics, he adds.

Just as Oyan and Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh receive narcotics via the Murkongselek railway belt in Assam, Wokha’s drug supply is routed through Merapani, another border town in Assam. In both places, drugs do not arrive directly from Myanmar although Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland share long international borders with the country.

While the Northeast, along with states such as Punjab and Rajasthan, is identified by the NCB as a major hotspot for her - oin trafficking, it is important to place the region’s crisis in perspective. States such as Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland remain less affected than several other parts of the country in terms of overall narcotics enforcement indicators.

In 2024, for instance, law enforcement agencies across India seized more than 1 million kilograms of narcotic drugs. Arrests under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act were the highest in Kerala (24,517), followed by Punjab (9,734), according to a reply to a Lok Sabha question in February last year. By comparison, Arunachal Pradesh recorded 323 arrests and Nagaland 273.

The relatively modest numbers, however, should not be mistaken for a lesser threat. In sparsely populated, predominantly tribal hill states such as Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, even a few hundred users can leave lasting scars on fami - lies and entire communities.

For many former users who are now parents, the greatest fear is no longer about relapsing. It is the possibility that their own children could one day follow the path they once did.

“One question haunted me every day,” says a 40-year-old former user from Oyan. “What if my children too start taking drugs? That fear pushed me to reclaim my life before it was too late.”

The real battle is no longer on the border, it is inside homes.