Editorial

Young and Vulnerable
A 12-year-old was intercepted at the Melli Check-Post with a consignment of prescription drugs of abuse on Monday night. The volume of ‘drugs’ was substantial, not something that could be explained away to a prescription. The pre-teen was obviously being used as a ‘mule’ because his age would not rouse suspicion among the personnel manning the check-posts who have become rather effective interceptors of substances of abuse.
But the lad was still stopped, checked and the substances confiscated. While the fact that children as young as 12 are being used as couriers might come as a shock to the sanitised distance of most readers, the fact that the cops thought it necessary to check the boy’s knapsack suggests that this is not a very new strategy of the peddlers. Given the increased policing at the check-posts, peddlers have constantly been devising new ways to ferry in contraband – from using women as couriers to filling tyres and tubes with contraband to opting for keeping it in plain sight on the dashboard, hoping that the obvious would be overlooked, they have tried everything; and the cops have learnt to expect ingenuity in how drugs are brought in. But the desperation of the peddlers is not necessarily a positive. For one, the fact that they continue bringing in stuff despite the risks [SADA is a tough act] is proof that addiction has not come down in Sikkim. Their deployment of innocents as couriers is suggestive of the lengths of depravity they are willing to fall to. This should worry everyone concerned. The children are already disadvantaged in Sikkim where an elder generation pursues different priorities and rarely make the time or funds for the young. The underprivileged, who should be receiving more societal attention, are left exposed to the wily mechanisations of peddlers and their ilk and hence vulnerable to exploitation as couriers [in the present case] or initiated into addiction. Both of these are happening and a blatant abuse of what children deserve plays on. The fact that at a time when government schools across the state are having their final exams, a 12-year-old can be brought in to lug a bag full of drugs, raises too many distress flags than the State is apparently willing to even notice. It goes without saying that the person who put the kid on the job needs to arrested and booked for more offences than just those under the Sikkim Ant-Drugs Act, but what demands a closer introspection by the State at large is how such a young child could have been left so defenceless and why such a travesty was allowed to transpire...