Hyderabad: It's a tablet. It's pink. It's Yaba. And it's deadly. Bangladesh is realising how ruinous the pink drug Yaba can be.
Yaba has penetrated every nook and corner of Bangladesh and millions are hooked to it. Millions are suffering the insufferable. Careers are exploding, families are breaking, fatal health conditions are increasing. Many are dying from the ill effects of the drug while many others are dying in police 'encounters'.
The scourge has spread so wide and penetrated so deep that even government security people are falling prey to it. Yaba is reported to have been used first in Bangladesh when it was found in capital Dhaka in 2006. Within just a decade it has swallowed Bangladesh. So much so that the police and border forces find it too hard to contain the spread of the drug. However Yaba is hardly called by its name in Bangladesh. It has many nicknames like lal, bori, Khaon, pill, guti, and a host of others.
Yaba might have been first used by the well-off youth in Dhaka a little more than a decade ago, but the substance is not a new thing. In Thiland it was used, often legally, back in the early seventies. But its ill effects forced the Thai authorities to ban the drug.
Yaba is very beneficial to the user for the first few days. The taker of Yaba gets lot of energy and his performance everywhere increases. There is no sign at first that one is taking it. Then the effects start showing. One becomes so dependant on it, like any other dangerous substance like LSD or heroin, that the addict just cannot live without it. The consequences are disastraous. One becomes a mental wreck, the faculties go, and addict's kidney, heart, liver, brain all get damaged.
A few million Bangladeshi youths are hooked to Yaba. And some police personnel as well. It is easily available. It is cheap. And it is irresistible. The government has come down heavily on the addicts, the suppliers, the dealers, and on anybody linked to the drug. This often sees arrests, and in some cases killings. Fear of police reprisals forced many dealers to surrender to police recently. Though police claim the surrender has reduced the use of drugs considerably, the problems are far from over.
The hardest problem is to stop the sell or supply of Yaba in villages and towns. Yaba brings money fast and this has lured so many people into this. Police and border guards believe that the scourge can be reduced to the minimum if the drug is stopped at the entry points. Which means effective checking, extensive patrolling and cooperation with the source country. The source country of Yaba is Myanmar. Problem is Myanmar authorities are not much responsive. It is alleged that many Myanmar military personnel deployed along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border are themselves engaged in the trade .
The kingpins of the Yaba trade have engaged impoverished people on both sides of the border to be couriers of Yaba. The drug is smuggled inside Bangladesh hidden in mobile phones and other innocuous objects, and even inside couriers' rectum or courier women's vagina.
While the principal supply of Yaba comes from Myanmar, some of the drugs are smuggled from India through the Indo-Bangla border. The drug comes from Myanmar through the bordering riverway too. But manpower crunch in the border police or in the coast guard is a serious handicap for the Bangladesh security forces.
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Yet the influence of Yaba over the Bangladesh population is so toxic that Bangladesh must declare an all-out war on Yaba. That will save millions of youths from the brink of ruin and save the country's fast growing economy.
