TNN | Sep 14, 2015, 02.45 AM IST
Devika Sequeira
Round, metal-framed glasses lend the tall, middle-aged Jens a professorial look. Among the throngs of tourists on the beaches, the Swede would easily pass for a respectable, well-to-do European. But that is far from the truth. Some weeks ago, one late evening, Jens stormed into an old-age home in Siolim causing quite a stir. He had not a stitch of clothes on him.
"Why did you do that Jens? Why did you go there and cause all that commotion?" Dr Jawaharlal Henriques bellows at him.
"Because it was dark and the police were chasing me with dogs on the road, so I ran and ran till I saw lights coming from a big house and went in," Jens says sheepishly.
"The police in Goa don't chase people with dogs. They don't use dogs to chase people. And why would they be chasing you anyway?" Henriques counters him. "Do you know this is the result of your addiction? You were hallucinating that day."
Clothed and fed by the nuns in the home, Jens—like countless tourists before him—ended up in Henriques' St Anthony's Hospital and Research Centre in Anjuna that night, for treatment for a marijuana addiction. Currently 57, he's been using hashish for 39 years.
"It helps me connect with my spiritual side," he said to me. He had bought three blocks of hash from a Bengali dealer in Anjuna for Rs 15,000, which he thought was "quite cheap".
"Don't ever think that charas is a 'safe' drug," Henriques stresses. In the Swede's case, the long-term use had caused his paranoia and hallucinations, he added.
It's a relatively quiet day at St Anthony's, given probably that this is the off-season for tourism. But just then, another foreigner arrived. This one, 31, had flown in all the way from St Petersburg, Russia, to be treated for his GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate, another club drug) addiction.
"Some of them hear of me through friends who've been here, others find me on the net," Henriques says. Hardly surprising. Since he set up base in Anjuna over two decades ago, the psychiatrist has acquired a reputation for no-fuss treatment of drug abuse, something the police frown upon. The majority of his drug rehab patients are tourists, either foreigners or domestic.
But if there's anyone keyed into the drugs doing the rounds on the Goa tourist coast, it has to be Dr Henriques. And he's concerned, he says, by the steep spike in the number of drug cases this past year, dominated largely by an increase in mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) abuse.
Known better by its street names MD, m-cat, meow-meow (because of its strong smell of cat piss), the stimulant is available even online as plant food and bath salts and comes comparatively cheap.
Between December to March this year, Henriques has treated 133 drug cases, a high increase from the 80 cases he handled last year. Two of his patients died. He believes the spike has to do with the entry and easy availability of mephedrone in India.
"Mephedrone is much cheaper and needs just 15 to 45 minutes to take effect. It's either sniffed or ingested," he says. What comes as a surprise is that the majority of drug overdose cases he's had in the past months have been of Indian tourists.
"They come here to holiday and party and just get carried away," he adds.
At least 80 of the drug cases at St Anthony's this year were domestic tourists, most of them overdosed on MDMA, some on mephedrone and a host of other drugs.
Crime Branch SP Kartik Kashyap too confirms that recreational drug use in Goa is highest among Indian tourists who come to party.
"They come here to party like they're in Ibiza. The less the parties, the less the market," he says. He insists mephedrone is not produced in Goa and most of it comes from chemical pilferages in small pharma companies in Chandigarh, Baddi in Himachal, Uttarakhand and Kasganj in UP.
In March this year the Mumbai police seized 114 kg of mephedrone from the home of a constable in Satara. The haul was estimated to be worth Rs 22.40 crore and had a woman peddler and a police and Customs nexus.
Kashyap says the Goa police had started booking cases of mephedrone peddling long before the substance was brought under the NDPS Act in February of this year. "As far as we were concerned, we knew it was a stimulant and was being abused," he said.
He asserts drug trafficking in Goa is "fairly miniscule compared to Delhi and Punjab," and Goan peddlers are really at the lowest end of the scale in the illegal trade.
At the North Goa District Hospital in Mapusa, where Dr Rajesh Dhume is senior psychiatrist, no cases of mephedrone addiction have ever popped up. Dr Dhume's wing is overburdened with Goa's worst nightmare—alcohol addiction. The day we met, he'd admitted three alcohol abuse patients. On an average, 25% of the OPD in this hospital is burdened with alcohol-related cases. One of the reasons few young people who do recreational drugs come to government hospitals is because they prefer the secrecy afforded in private hospitals, he says.
The few cases Dr Dhume handles are heroin addicts, aged between 27-37, most of them school dropouts from the lower middle classes. They're mostly hotel touts, pushers, guides and waiters, and have a seasonal pattern of intravenous drug use, he says. They stay in hospital in the off-season and vanish to do business when the season picks up.
But he warns that he's seeing more and more drug use moving from the coast to Goa's interiors like Bicholim, Usgao and Sanquelim. "These areas were never on the drug radar before," he says.
(The writer is a senior journalist) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Goa-parties-on-mephedrone-high/articleshow/48949469.cms
Devika Sequeira
Round, metal-framed glasses lend the tall, middle-aged Jens a professorial look. Among the throngs of tourists on the beaches, the Swede would easily pass for a respectable, well-to-do European. But that is far from the truth. Some weeks ago, one late evening, Jens stormed into an old-age home in Siolim causing quite a stir. He had not a stitch of clothes on him.
"Why did you do that Jens? Why did you go there and cause all that commotion?" Dr Jawaharlal Henriques bellows at him.
"Because it was dark and the police were chasing me with dogs on the road, so I ran and ran till I saw lights coming from a big house and went in," Jens says sheepishly.
"The police in Goa don't chase people with dogs. They don't use dogs to chase people. And why would they be chasing you anyway?" Henriques counters him. "Do you know this is the result of your addiction? You were hallucinating that day."
Clothed and fed by the nuns in the home, Jens—like countless tourists before him—ended up in Henriques' St Anthony's Hospital and Research Centre in Anjuna that night, for treatment for a marijuana addiction. Currently 57, he's been using hashish for 39 years.
"It helps me connect with my spiritual side," he said to me. He had bought three blocks of hash from a Bengali dealer in Anjuna for Rs 15,000, which he thought was "quite cheap".
"Don't ever think that charas is a 'safe' drug," Henriques stresses. In the Swede's case, the long-term use had caused his paranoia and hallucinations, he added.
It's a relatively quiet day at St Anthony's, given probably that this is the off-season for tourism. But just then, another foreigner arrived. This one, 31, had flown in all the way from St Petersburg, Russia, to be treated for his GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate, another club drug) addiction.
"Some of them hear of me through friends who've been here, others find me on the net," Henriques says. Hardly surprising. Since he set up base in Anjuna over two decades ago, the psychiatrist has acquired a reputation for no-fuss treatment of drug abuse, something the police frown upon. The majority of his drug rehab patients are tourists, either foreigners or domestic.
But if there's anyone keyed into the drugs doing the rounds on the Goa tourist coast, it has to be Dr Henriques. And he's concerned, he says, by the steep spike in the number of drug cases this past year, dominated largely by an increase in mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) abuse.
Known better by its street names MD, m-cat, meow-meow (because of its strong smell of cat piss), the stimulant is available even online as plant food and bath salts and comes comparatively cheap.
Between December to March this year, Henriques has treated 133 drug cases, a high increase from the 80 cases he handled last year. Two of his patients died. He believes the spike has to do with the entry and easy availability of mephedrone in India.
"Mephedrone is much cheaper and needs just 15 to 45 minutes to take effect. It's either sniffed or ingested," he says. What comes as a surprise is that the majority of drug overdose cases he's had in the past months have been of Indian tourists.
"They come here to holiday and party and just get carried away," he adds.
At least 80 of the drug cases at St Anthony's this year were domestic tourists, most of them overdosed on MDMA, some on mephedrone and a host of other drugs.
Crime Branch SP Kartik Kashyap too confirms that recreational drug use in Goa is highest among Indian tourists who come to party.
"They come here to party like they're in Ibiza. The less the parties, the less the market," he says. He insists mephedrone is not produced in Goa and most of it comes from chemical pilferages in small pharma companies in Chandigarh, Baddi in Himachal, Uttarakhand and Kasganj in UP.
In March this year the Mumbai police seized 114 kg of mephedrone from the home of a constable in Satara. The haul was estimated to be worth Rs 22.40 crore and had a woman peddler and a police and Customs nexus.
Kashyap says the Goa police had started booking cases of mephedrone peddling long before the substance was brought under the NDPS Act in February of this year. "As far as we were concerned, we knew it was a stimulant and was being abused," he said.
He asserts drug trafficking in Goa is "fairly miniscule compared to Delhi and Punjab," and Goan peddlers are really at the lowest end of the scale in the illegal trade.
At the North Goa District Hospital in Mapusa, where Dr Rajesh Dhume is senior psychiatrist, no cases of mephedrone addiction have ever popped up. Dr Dhume's wing is overburdened with Goa's worst nightmare—alcohol addiction. The day we met, he'd admitted three alcohol abuse patients. On an average, 25% of the OPD in this hospital is burdened with alcohol-related cases. One of the reasons few young people who do recreational drugs come to government hospitals is because they prefer the secrecy afforded in private hospitals, he says.
The few cases Dr Dhume handles are heroin addicts, aged between 27-37, most of them school dropouts from the lower middle classes. They're mostly hotel touts, pushers, guides and waiters, and have a seasonal pattern of intravenous drug use, he says. They stay in hospital in the off-season and vanish to do business when the season picks up.
But he warns that he's seeing more and more drug use moving from the coast to Goa's interiors like Bicholim, Usgao and Sanquelim. "These areas were never on the drug radar before," he says.
(The writer is a senior journalist) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Goa-parties-on-mephedrone-high/articleshow/48949469.cms
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