In 2024, when I headed Haryana’s narcotics bureau, one of our officers stood before a hall of college students and explained, slide by slide, why drugs are dangerous. Halfway through, a second-year student stood up and asked a question the officer could not answer: if a student like me knows where drugs are being sold, why don’t the police? The hall erupted. The video went viral. And the lecture, for all its good intentions, did not change a single mind in that room.I have thought about that young man many times since. He was not ignorant. He was not reckless. He was telling us something we did not want to hear. Our young people are not short of information about drugs. They are short of better things to do.

The evidence on awareness campaigns should humble every government that relies on them. For two decades, America sent police officers into thousands of classrooms under a programme called D.A.R.E. to teach children to resist drugs. When researchers pooled the best studies in 2004, they found its effect on drug use would have needed to be twenty times larger to count as even small. Between 1998 and 2004, the US Congress put nearly a billion dollars into a national anti-drug media campaign for young people. Its own official evaluation found no evidence that it reduced drug use, and some sign that teenagers who saw more of the advertisements became more willing to try cannabis.There is an irony in that story worth pausing on. The campaign’s slogan invited teenagers to fill in a blank: “ : My Anti-Drug.” Its example was “Soccer”. America had found the right answer, and then spent a billion dollars advertising it instead of building playing fields.

None of this means awareness is worthless. It means awareness alone cannot carry the weight we keep placing on it. Ask any sixteen-year-old in Haryana whether drugs are harmful, and he will tell you they are. He knows. Knowing was never the problem.The problem lies in the hours between the last school bell and sleep. Adolescence is the season of life when we most hunger for reward, for novelty and for the approval of friends. At that age, boredom is not a small discomfort. It is an ache. And a whole industry has learned to profit from it. Drugs promise a quick high. So does a bottle. So does the betting app that pays out just often enough to keep a boy tapping at two in the morning. They are different products selling the same thing: a fast thrill to fill an empty hour.

You cannot lecture away a craving. You can only offer something better to fill the hour.Iceland learned this a quarter of a century ago. In 1998, its teenagers drank and used drugs as heavily as any in Europe. Instead of more posters, the country invested in organised sport, music and clubs, and drew parents in as partners. By 2016, the share of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month had fallen from 42 per cent to 5 per cent, while the share playing organised sport had risen from 23 per cent to 42 per cent.I have seen it work here, too. As Haryana’s sports director, I set up a scholarship called the Sports and Physical Aptitude Test, with two conditions: turn up at the playground 22 days a month, and stay away from drugs. We had 300 coaches and expected about 10,000 children in the first year. More than 85,000 registered. By 2013, the number had reached 1.5 million. When young people are offered something worth reaching for, they reach for it.But I learned something else, and it matters just as much. Recreation fills an evening. A future fills a life. A gifted sixteen-year-old needs more than a game to pass the time. He needs to see a road that leads somewhere: a team, a scholarship, a contract, a career.

So Vikalp Ka Sankalp, a pledge of alternatives, must mean more than open playgrounds. It must mean leagues in sports with a global market, not only the ones Haryana already wins. Take baseball. In 2008, two young javelin throwers from Uttar Pradesh, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, became the first Indians to sign professional contracts with an American baseball club. Haryana’s wrestlers and javelin throwers have the shoulders, the speed and the nerve that game rewards. My aim is to see a young man from Haryana in Major League Baseball within five years.The point is not baseball. The point is that a boy who can see a road ahead of him has a reason to stay off the dealer’s road. And when one boy from a Haryana village makes it, a thousand others will believe they can too.Some will say this is soft, that sport and music are pleasant extras and real policy is about enforcement. Enforcement matters. Haryana made a record 6,801 drug arrests last year. Yet the number of young people registering at the state’s de-addiction centres rose nearly fivefold in four years. Arrests can break a supply line. They cannot end the demand that keeps building new ones.

And there is one thing a lecture can never do. A lecture fights one danger at a time. An alternative fights all of them at once. The boy in the akhara at six in the evening is not at the liquor vend. He is not at the dealer’s corner. He is not on the betting app. One good evening protects him from all three. One good future protects him for life.Our young people have heard enough about what to avoid. What they are asking for, as that student was asking in his own way, is somewhere to go, something to master and someone to become. A state that can offer them that will not need to lecture them at all. It will only need to open the gates, and point to the horizon. / DAILY WORLD /

( DAILY WORLD )