The Panic We Exported To Ourselves

Credit By: RK Health & Investigative Desk

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• 14 Apr 2026

India's zombie drug scare turned sick migrant worker into national emergency. The real drug crisis sitting quietly in Kashmir's homes and hospitals never trends.

His name was never in the headline. That was the first problem. A man stood motionless near a college campus in Bengaluru on an ordinary afternoon: confused, disoriented, visibly unwell. Someone filmed him. Someone else attached a label. Within hours, the video had travelled from a street in Yelahanka to family WhatsApp groups in Srinagar, Sopore, and Anantnag, accompanied by all-capitals warnings that the zombie drug had arrived. Parents forwarded it to their children. Teachers discussed it in staffrooms. Television channels summoned experts. The machinery of national alarm had found its raw material and was processing it at full speed.

Then Bengaluru Police issued four quiet sentences that the panic machinery had no interest in amplifying. The man had arthritis. He had taken prescribed painkillers alongside alcohol. Medical tests found no narcotic or psychotropic substance in his body. He was a migrant worker, three months from home, possibly struggling, certainly unwell. Not a drug casualty. Not a harbinger of American-style catastrophe. A human being who had wandered into the frame of someone's phone and been converted, without consent and without accuracy, into a symbol of collective fear. The retraction travelled at the speed of a government press release. The panic had already done its work.

What Xylazine Actually Is

The zombie drug is not a myth. That must be stated clearly, because the Bengaluru debunking should not become its own form of complacency.

Xylazine is a veterinary sedative, effective and widely used in animal medicine, that has migrated into American illicit drug markets over the past decade with consequences that have genuinely alarmed public health officials. Mixed with fentanyl and heroin, it produces extreme sedation, suppressed breathing, and the drug's most disfiguring signature: deep necrotic skin wounds that resist treatment and have, in documented cases, required amputation. It is cheap, difficult to detect in standard drug tests, and most critically, does not respond to naloxone, the medication that has saved thousands of lives from opioid overdose. A first responder administering naloxone to a xylazine-laced overdose victim may reverse the opioid component while the xylazine continues its damage unimpeded.

Sam Quinones, in Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, traces how pharmaceutical opioids, black tar heroin, and eventually fentanyl colonised American communities that considered themselves entirely removed from such problems, small towns, working families, people who had never encountered drug dependency in any form they recognised. His central argument is that drug crises migrate quietly along supply chains, exploiting poverty, dislocation, and healthcare systems that medicate pain without understanding it. Xylazine is the latest chapter of that story. What embeds itself in the American drug supply has a documented history of travelling outward.

India has not confirmed Xylazine in its drug supply. That absence of confirmed evidence is a fact, not a reason for complacency. Xylazine has been documented in Pakistan's drug market through regional health monitoring networks. India's border regions, including those directly relevant to Jammu and Kashmir, are not insulated from what enters neighbouring markets. The veterinary supply chain for Xylazine within India is neither strictly regulated nor comprehensively monitored. The conditions for eventual contamination exist. The contamination has not yet arrived. There is a significant and important difference between those two statements.

The Crisis The Panic Obscured

While India's attention was briefly directed at a drug that has not been confirmed in the country, the drug problems that are confirmed and documented continued without equivalent alarm, without equivalent coverage, without equivalent urgency.

In Jammu and Kashmir, the substance abuse landscape is neither hypothetical nor emerging. It is established, worsening, and structurally rooted in conditions that predate any viral video by decades. Multiple health assessments have documented rising opioid dependency across the valley, with pharmaceutical tramadol, codeine-based preparations, and synthetic opioids forming the backbone of a problem that cuts across every social stratum. It reaches students in Srinagar's coaching centres, daily wage workers in the outer districts, and increasingly young women who were long considered outside the demographic of concern.

Johann Hari, in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, argues with uncomfortable precision that addiction is not primarily a chemical phenomenon. It is a response to disconnection, broken social bonds, foreclosed futures, and chemical relief becoming the only reliable comfort available. His thesis carries particular weight in post-conflict Kashmir, where an entire generation has grown up under circumstances that would strain even the most resilient individual. The trauma context is not incidental. It is the architecture within which dependency finds its foothold.

The Directorate of Social Welfare and Kashmir-based rehabilitation NGOs have flagged rising caseloads, strained treatment infrastructure, and the near-complete absence of any serious public health campaign tailored to the cultural and social reality of Kashmiri communities. The government has acknowledged the problem in the language of policy documents. It has not addressed it in the language of funded, sustained, community-level action.

What The Panic Costs

Stanley Cohen, in his foundational work Folk Devils and Moral Panics, described how societies periodically amplify a threat far beyond its actual dimensions, creating a screen onto which collective anxieties are projected while the real, structural problem continues undisturbed beneath the noise. The zombie drug episode fits this template precisely.

The panic misallocated attention. It deepened stigma every round of zombie drug coverage reinforces the cultural reflex to treat addiction as a moral failure rather than a medical condition. In conservative societies, that stigma is the single largest barrier to treatment-seeking. When a young man from Pulwama or Handwara sees his condition publicly equated with disoriented figures shuffling through city streets, the likelihood of him walking into a rehabilitation centre decreases, not increases.

The government's accountability in this moment is specific and measurable. The Ministry of Health has no real-time rapid-response mechanism for viral health misinformation. The Narcotics Control Bureau is not equipped to engage at social media speed. J&K's health institutions, including Government Medical College (GMC) Srinagar and the Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (IMHANS), should be leading evidence-based public campaigns that treat dependency as they would treat diabetes: as a manageable condition requiring sustained care, not a character defect requiring punishment.

J&K Police: The Iron Hand Must Move Faster Than The Drug

The Jammu and Kashmir Police has demonstrated, across multiple operations in recent years, a serious institutional commitment to dismantling drug trafficking networks operating through the border belt and urban supply chains. Seizures of heroin, synthetic drugs, and pharmaceutical contraband have been documented with increasing regularity, and that enforcement record deserves acknowledgement. But interdiction alone is not prevention. The drug that is seized at the border is the drug that failed to reach a family. The drug that reaches the family first requires a different kind of response entirely.

Parents must be the first line of response. Watch your children not with suspicion, but with attention. Know their circles, their silences, their sudden changes. A child withdrawing from family, a student whose habits shift without explanation, a young person who cannot account for money, these are signals that demand conversation, not punishment.

If you see something that concerns you, act immediately. Dial 112 J&K's police emergency helpline or contact your nearest police station directly. Do not wait for certainty. Wait costs lives. J&K Police must intensify its community presence, its school outreach, and its intelligence on emerging supply routes before the drug that has not yet arrived is the drug we are trying to contain after the fact.

 The Man in the Video

He was found. He was tested. He was cleared. He was never named in any of the coverage that made him briefly famous. The man who became India's zombie drug moment was a migrant worker with arthritis, three months from home, who had taken his prescribed medication and made the human mistake of also drinking alcohol. He became a prop in someone else's anxiety narrative stripped of his name, his story, and his dignity in the service of a panic that outlived the facts that had briefly interrupted it.

Kashmir's real drug emergency does not arrive with a dramatic name or a viral video. It has been here for years sitting in homes, in hospitals, in the silence of families who have no language for what they are watching happen to someone they love.

It is waiting not for a trending hashtag. It is waiting for a government that will finally take it seriously.

Books Referenced: Sam Quinones, Dreamland (2015); Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015); Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972)

This report is part of an ongoing series on Kashmir's public health crisis. Healthcare workers, rehabilitation professionals, and community members with information are invited to contact this newsroom in confidence.