It has long been assumed, in policy circles across Nagaland, that awareness is the antidote to addiction. Posters have been printed, seminars have been convened, pledges have been signed in school assembly halls and yet, if the recent submissions to the Morung Suggestion Platform are any indication, none of it has moved the needle in any meaningful way. What emerges instead is a portrait of a State whose institutional response has been calibrated for optics rather than outcomes, and whose citizens are now saying so, plainly and in large numbers.
The pattern is not subtle. A one-dimensional strategy, awareness campaigns layered with prayer meetings, has been treated for years as sufficient, when what has actually been called for is something far more structural, confidential counselling, sustained mental health infrastructure and a crackdown on trafficking networks that no amount of moral messaging can substitute for. That this distinction had to be spelled out by ordinary residents, rather than anticipated by those tasked with designing public health policy, is itself an indictment.
Consider the fatigue that has visibly set in around awareness drives. It has been observed that repetition without depth breeds numbness rather than vigilance; a seminar attended for the fifth time teaches nothing new, and a poster campaign cannot be mistaken for a treatment pathway. What has been asked for instead, one-on-one counselling, judgment-free spaces, an “ecosystem of mental health care” reaching public squares is not a radical demand. It is the baseline that should have existed already in a State grappling with a documented substance use crisis. Its absence cannot be explained away by resource constraints alone; it reflects a choice, made and remade over successive budget cycles, to fund visibility over capacity.
The school-level suggestions deserve particular scrutiny. Life-skills education and physical fitness programmes have been proposed as protective infrastructure, not as an afterthought bolted onto a health curriculum. Yet it is worth asking why such basics, qualified physical education teachers, functioning sports infrastructure, structured outlets for adolescent stress remain aspirational rather than standard in 2026. If discipline, self-esteem, and resilience are indeed understood to be protective against substance use, as the submissions suggest, their absence from most school timetables cannot be treated as a minor administrative gap. It is a policy failure with a traceable line to the addiction rates now being lamented.
Equally revealing is the account of how substance use took root in the first place, a slow normalization, generational example-setting, and a social environment where depression and stress were neither named nor addressed. This origin story matters because it locates the problem not in individual weakness but in collective neglect, spanning decades and generations. A punitive lens alone, then, cannot resolve what was permitted to fester through inattention.
On enforcement, the public's position has been unambiguous, and rightly so: no amount of counselling or awareness can outpace a steady supply of illicit substances entering the State. Here, a genuine test of governmental will presents itself. Trafficking networks are not dismantled through campaigns; they are dismantled through sustained investigative capacity, inter-agency coordination, and political resolve willing to withstand the pressures that protect such networks. Whether that resolve exists has not yet been demonstrated at the scale the problem demands.
What is being called for, in sum, is not novel. A “balanced strategy”, prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, and enforcement operating in tandem, backed by regular surveys and real coordination between schools and health providers has been articulated with unusual clarity by the very public whose voices are too often solicited and then shelved. The test now is whether this input becomes the basis for structural reform, or whether it is filed away alongside the seminars it was meant to replace.
Recovery, as several respondents noted, requires a society willing to extend a hand rather than an outcast's label. But compassion at the community level cannot substitute for competence at the institutional level. Nagaland's substance use crisis will not be resolved by better slogans. It will be resolved, if at all, by counsellors who are funded, trafficking routes that are closed, and a generation of young people given something more compelling to build than the habits their elders once modelled. Until then, the gap between what has been asked for and what has been delivered will remain the real story, one no awareness campaign has yet been designed to tell.
