On an afternoon in Chandigarh, a man stands motionless beside a parked scooter, his head tilted at an angle. Passersby slow down, stare, and reach for their phones. Within hours, the clip is everywhere—WhatsApp groups, Instagram reels, Facebook, X—circulating with a caption: “zombie drug”.

The footage, captured in Sector 33B in late March 2026, shows a Blinkit delivery worker frozen in place for close to two hours. A bidi hangs between his lips, unlit. His eyes appear vacant, his body indifferent to the honking around him. Residents call the police, who take him into custody and send him for a medical examination. No toxicology report is made public. Authorities issue an assurance that a complaint has been received, action taken, the situation “under control”.

Online, the response is anything but controlled. Speculation fills the vacuum of official silence. Commentators link the scene to xylazine, a veterinary sedative that has, in parts of the United States, been found mixed with opioids such as fentanyl. There, it has earned the moniker “zombie drug” for the limp, dissociative state it induces.

Punjab, already burdened by decades of substance abuse, finds itself cast in a cinematic nightmare. Weeks later, in Ludhiana, another video surfaces. On a public road, a young man and a young woman appear slumped and unresponsive, motionless amid the bustle. Eyewitnesses describe them as “zombie-like”. The clip spreads with questions: where are the police? What has the AAP government done to deliver on its promise of a drug-free Punjab?

A 2018 national survey by the AIIMS National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, whose findings were published in 2019, estimated that more than 2.3 crore Indians use opioids, with the Punjab–Haryana belt among the most affected regions.

Unlike in Chandigarh, where authorities acknowledged the incident, the Ludhiana episode is met with silence. No official clarification follows. The police continue to announce routine seizures under their “war against drugs” campaign, but this shared moment remains unaddressed.

Viral fear, scientific gaps

Similar viral videos have since surfaced from Karnataka, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. Together, these episodes, separated by weeks, have fed a national unease. They arrive in a region marked by its struggle with narcotics, where intoxicants have devastated families. But the imported label of “zombie drug”, with imagery from American streets, transforms these local scenes into signs of an invading epidemic.

The science, so far, tells a different story. Despite the viral claims, there is no confirmed forensic evidence of xylazine entering India’s drug supply. Health and narcotics authorities have not verified any such outbreak.

The figures captured in the viral videos may instead reflect realities—alcohol mixed with medication, opioid dependence, untreated mental health conditions, or overdoses of painkillers. According to experts, clinical literature, including studies in The Lancet Psychiatry, shows that such states are more often the result of poly-substance use than any single drug.

Anirudh Kala, a Ludhiana-based psychiatrist and author, cautions against overstating novelty in what is being described as a new drug panic. “The threat of drug abuse is intensifying, and there are already many lethal substances in circulation,” he says. “Heroin alone causes overdoses and deaths, and in India the scale of that problem is still not fully documented.”

Referring to the viral videos, Kala notes that “zombie” behaviour is consistent with the effects of certain sedatives or combinations of substances. “Different drugs act on the brain in different ways,” he says. “Some induce hallucinations, others produce dissociation or motor immobility. What we are seeing may be unusual in appearance, but pharmacologically it falls within known patterns.”

Kala places drug use within a human and social context. “Substances, natural as well as synthetic, have existed since the dawn of civilisation,” he says. “What has changed is the increasing role of laboratory-made drugs, which will continue to emerge and evolve.” The underlying issue, he adds, is not a substance but addiction itself. “Some people use substances casually, some become dependent, and many do not use them at all. The problem arises when use turns into addiction, whether it is to drugs like alcohol or heroin, or to behaviours such as gambling and porn.”

Field studies in Punjab have pointed to a generational cycle of dependency, where economic distress, unemployment, and the availability of heroin and pharmaceutical opioids create patterns of addiction that replicate within families.

In early April, in the Pandori area of Sultanpur Lodhi, a tragedy unfolded, removed from the spectacle of viral videos. Manjeet Kaur, a worker at the Ber Sahib Gurdwara, was preparing for the funeral of her fifth son. Sonu, 30, died during treatment at a government hospital in Amritsar. According to Manjeet Kaur, all five of her sons succumbed to drug addiction over the past eight years. The Punjab AAP has disputed this account, claiming that at least two of the deaths were caused by other factors, including burn injuries and chronic alcoholism. Regardless of the cause of each death, the family’s devastation is a marker of what addiction has wrought in the region.

Her story cuts through the noise of viral panic. The crisis is neither new nor imported. It is embedded, persistent, and local. Unlike the scenes in Chandigarh and Ludhiana, this is not a mystery of substances or speculation. It is a slow, cumulative collapse that has played out across Punjab for decades, in silence, breaking through in moments of grief.

Beyond Punjab, the alarm extends into Jammu and Kashmir, where authorities have begun framing the drug crisis in the language of national security. On April 15, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha described drug abuse as a “social cancer” requiring a “whole of government” and “whole of society” response, and promised to eliminate drug hotspots “like a surgical strike.” Speaking at a rally in Ramban as part of the Drug-Free Jammu Kashmir campaign, Sinha also linked narcotics trafficking to cross-border dynamics, accusing Pakistan of orchestrating drug smuggling into the region “to fund terrorism and destroy our young generation”.

In border corridors, narcotics trafficking intersects with networks of arms, money, and influence, blurring the line between a public health crisis and a security threat. Enforcement measures, from property seizures to arrests, have intensified alongside awareness campaigns. Yet even as enforcement escalates, officials acknowledge that addiction cannot be treated solely as a criminal matter. Appeals to families to treat addicts as patients reflect a recognition of the social dimension of the crisis.

Policy analysts have flagged India’s reliance on enforcement under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act framework, even as treatment infrastructure and harm-reduction strategies remain uneven and under-resourced.

The distortion of a label

Globally, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has noted a shift towards synthetic and transportable substances, a trend now visible along India’s border States. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the Border Security Force and Punjab Police seized 331 kg of heroin along the Punjab border, according to The Tribune. Drones have become a tool of traffickers—GPS-guided drops and low-altitude night flights have made detection difficult. The seizures extend beyond heroin; synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, are on the rise. Arms and ammunition have also been recovered, pointing to the overlap between narcotics and security networks.

In Himachal Pradesh, regions have witnessed the spread of drug networks. While heroin dominates, synthetic substances such as LSD are making inroads, particularly among younger users. In March, a bust in Shimla exposed an interstate network stretching from Bengaluru to the Himalayan towns. More troubling was the alleged involvement of four Special Task Force personnel, who were dismissed and arrested—a sign of the reach of narcotics into the institutions tasked with combating them.

Across India, the drug economy is becoming more decentralised, enabled by digital platforms, courier networks, and encrypted transactions. Women are drawn into both consumption and trafficking networks. NDPS cases have surged over the past decade.

Political responses, so far, have followed lines—crackdowns, accountability measures, legislative proposals—but the conditions persist.

The term “zombie drug,” imported from another context, risks flattening a reality into a single narrative. As Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, has argued, societies often project their anxieties onto drugs themselves, turning social crises into chemical villains. Attention shifts away from structural realities—addiction, unemployment, mental health, social dislocation—towards an externalised threat.

For some observers, the crisis cannot be understood through the lens of enforcement or public health alone. Ashok Kaul, a sociologist and Fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, places the phenomenon within a structural shift. “The last four decades have marked a transition from a stable bipolar world order to a fragmented and uncertain multipolar configuration,” he says. “At the same time, institutions such as family and community, that once mediated stability, have weakened under the pressures of market expansion, consumerism, and surveillance-driven systems that privilege efficiency over solidarity.”

Kaul argues that the category of youth encounters exclusion alongside aspiration. “Intensified capitalism has sharpened competition to the extent that only a segment is able to sustain success and social legitimacy, while sections are rendered surplus or excluded,” he says. Within that context, drug use, Kaul suggests, is less an isolated deviance than a response to social exclusion and the pressures of performance.

“The erosion of family structures and the declining authority of primary groups have led to an exhaustion of cultural capital, weakening the transmission of norms and values that once anchored conduct,” Kaul says. “Drugs, available and culturally mediated, offer a refuge from anxiety, purposelessness, and emotional strain. But this refuge hardens into dependence.”

Others point to the security dimension. Prakash Singh, a former Director General of the Border Security Force and a former member of the National Security Advisory Board, describes drug abuse as both a domestic challenge and a geopolitical threat. “India has long been a transit country for drug smuggling, and the problem is worsening as we remain sandwiched between trafficking routes,” he says. He points to cross-border dynamics, particularly along the western frontier. “For several years now, Pakistan has been pushing drugs into Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir using drones. Similarly, on the eastern border, Manipur has been facing a drugs crisis,” he says. “This is not merely a law-and-order issue. It is narco-terrorism aimed at weakening the country’s youth.”

Singh also raises concerns about institutional responses. “There are instances where political complicity cannot be ignored,” he says. “Given the gravity of the threat, the response has not always matched the scale of the problem.”

Meanwhile, the crisis continues to unfold in less visible ways—in homes like Manjeet Kaur’s, in relapses, in untreated trauma, and in communities where the line between survival and escape grows thinner by the day. The videos will continue to circulate. The captions will continue to feed fear. But beyond the spectacle lies a truth: India’s drug crisis does not need a new name to be understood. It needs attention, institutional accountability, and a willingness to confront the conditions that sustain it.

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