SOCIETY: THE BURNT OUT ENDS OF SMOKY DAYS.

On a cold, rainy night in Peshawar, an earthy aroma wafts out of a boy's hostel room. Inside, the room is full of smoke and dimly lit. A classical Pashto song is softly playing in the background, while a heater in the corner of the room provides warmth to the six young men who sit in a circle without sweaters or jackets. They are sitting around a newspaper on which lie scattered cigarettes and a little black packet of charas (hashish).

Each of them take a puff or two of the lit cigarette that is being passed around, while they converse as though they are intoxicated. As they smoke, they also sip hot tea. These young men, aged roughly from 19 to 26 years, belong to different districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). Most of them have been friends for some six years now, since they all came from their villages to study in Peshawar.

Two of them, Fazal* and Shehzad*, are from Swat; Rafaqat* is from Karak, Arshad* from Mardan, Hamza* from Swabi and Hussain* from Charsadda. Shehzad, 26, is doing his house job at one of the largest hospitals of KP, Rafaqat and Hamza have done their Masters in philosophy and the rest are engineers working at a private firm. They meet almost every night to smoke up.

When the lockdown was imposed, they were all forced to go home and Shehzad lost his smoking company. In Hussain's village, charas was not easily available and he couldn't find friends to smoke up with. He also worried somebody would discover him smoking and tell his family. To deal with this problem, he would often go towards the mountains or the riverside, so that he could smoke up in peace. He was relieved when the lockdown eased up and he could come back to Peshawar.

Like other businesses, the Covid-19 pandemic has also adversely affected the illegal market of charas. Users and sellers of the drug are both worried about their survival. The users who are addicted to hashish are worried about accessing it; the sellers, on the other hand, face a cut in their income. The demand for the drug was significantly reduced since the beginning of the pandemic because people either lost their jobs or suffered pay cuts and therefore couldn't afford to spend as much on hashish.

'The lockdown has been a terrible time for us,' Shehzad says, as he takes in the last puff of his blunt. Shehzad and his friends normally consume 60 grams of charas each week, which costs them about 3,500 rupees, including delivery charges.

The Covid-19 related lockdowns affected even the illegal...