The young people we never see

At four in the afternoon, the school gate opens. The day's lessons on drugs are over. A fifteen-year-old has sat through a lecture, or walked past a poster, or listened to an officer explain what drugs do to a life, and now he leaves, heading home, or to a street corner, or to a phone. What happens next matters. The next five hours may count for more than anything he heard that day.

Does he have someone to talk to that evening? Somewhere to be? A reason to get up early tomorrow? These questions sound unrelated to drugs, but they are not. We usually begin with the substance. It may be better to begin with the young person.

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The Boy on the Next Bench

The scale of the problem is real. A study of more than 6,000 adolescents across 108 schools in six districts, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia, found that 21.4 per cent were at moderate or high risk of substance abuse. That measures risk, not abuse itself. Still, it is one student in five. Easy access, heavy digital exposure and risky behavioural environments went with higher risk, while stronger social engagement was protective. The researchers concluded that the environment around a young person shapes his risk. That is also why it can be part of the answer.

This brings us to a question we rarely ask. Most research on adolescent drug abuse studies those who abuse. We know a great deal about their friends, families and neighbourhoods. We know far less about the boy on the next bench, who was offered the same thing and said no. His story is hard to tell. A young person who never becomes dependent leaves no record, no file, no statistic, and so the greatest successes of prevention are invisible by nature.

What Protects Him

Indian research is beginning to describe what that boy has. A study of 1,982 adolescents in Mumbai and Kolkata linked school connectedness, meaning feeling part of the school, happy in it and safe in it, to lower susceptibility to tobacco use. In a 2024 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Research, fifteen young people in Assam, all at elevated risk because family or friends were addicted, named what protected them. Nurturing relationships with parents. Healthy ways of coping. Distance from "bad" company. Something that mattered more to them than abusing substances. Fifteen is a small number, but these young people were naming their own protection, and that is rare enough to deserve attention.

A caution is needed here. None of this proves that connection causes protection. A boy who has started abusing substances often drifts from the cricket team and the classroom first, so the arrow can run both ways. That is why prevention should promise resilience. It should never promise certainty.

Yet there is encouraging evidence from elsewhere. Between 1998 and 2016, the share of Iceland's 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month fell from 42 per cent to 5 per cent, while participation in sport rose from 23 to 42 per cent. Parents, schools and communities worked together, and young people were offered sport, music and art, with adults who knew where they were. The evidence is observational, and Iceland is small, so it is no recipe for India. Still, it suggests that a teenager's surroundings can shape his choices.

Belonging, Rightly Placed

Belonging, though, is not protective in itself. Many young people abuse substances in company, at a hostel, a college fest or a friend's terrace, and for them the drug is a form of membership. What matters is where the belonging is found. The team, the club and the class must be at least as easy to join as the alternative.

That responsibility has grown heavier, because much of adolescent life now happens on a phone, where no school gate applies. The adults nearby matter more than ever. The parent who notices a change in mood. The teacher who asks why a student has gone quiet. Enforcement does its part, interrupting supply and helping the dependent towards treatment, but prevention begins earlier, sometimes before the first experiment. It belongs to everyone in a young person's day, including the police officer who is often the first adult a worried family turns to.

Where Prevention Already Lives

In most Indian neighbourhoods, this work is already happening. Nobody calls it prevention. It is the cricket coach who waits at the maidan at six in the morning and notices who didn't turn up. It is the kabaddi and kho-kho teams in government schools, the akhara where an old pehelwan decides who is serious, the football match in the gully that ends only when the light fails. It is the tabla teacher who treats a restless boy as a student, the Bharatanatyam class where a shy girl finds her confidence, the Ganesh mandal or Durga Puja committee that trusts teenagers with real responsibility, the NCC parade, the NSS camp, the neighbourhood library where the librarian knows each regular by name.

We are unlikely ever to count what these places prevent. But a young person with a rehearsal tomorrow, a team that needs him and an elder who would notice his absence has a reason to say no that no poster can give. The success of prevention is not the number of young people we rescue after they fall. It is the number who never needed rescuing in the first place.

The article is authored by Navdeep Aggarwal, IPS.