Nasha mukti kendra for families from Sri Ganganagar.

What changed in 2016, and what it left behind

This is the part of the story that families in Sri Ganganagar usually know in their bones but have never had explained to them, so it is worth starting here.

For years doda post was sold legally in Rajasthan. The state ran licensed retail outlets, a few hundred of them, and registered users collected a monthly quota that a doctor had signed off. Sri Ganganagar was one of the districts where those queues formed. Then the state closed the outlets in 2016.

The supply stopped. The dependence did not.

A man who had been on a measured, doctor endorsed quota for fifteen or twenty years woke up one morning with nowhere legal to go. What he found instead was not measured and not clean, and it usually cost a great deal more. A significant share of the chitta and heroin cases we admit from this district did not begin as heroin cases at all. They began as doda cases that ran out of a legal door.

Two things follow from that, and both matter to your family.

• If the man in your house has been on doda for decades, that is a dependence, not a habit, and stopping it without medical help is not a test of character. How doda is treated.
• If he has moved on to chitta in the last few years, the doda years are still part of the picture and any centre that does not ask about them is not really treating him. How chitta is treated.

ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਵਿੱਚ

ਸ੍ਰੀ ਗੰਗਾਨਗਰ ਤੋਂ ਕਾਫ਼ੀ ਪਰਿਵਾਰ ਸਾਡੇ ਕੋਲ ਆਉਂਦੇ ਨੇ। ਸਾਡੇ ਦੋ ਕੇਂਦਰ ਨੇ, ਇੱਕ ਹਨੁਮਾਨਗੜ੍ਹ ਵਿੱਚ ਤੇ ਇੱਕ ਡਰੋਲੀ ਭਾਈ, ਮੋਗਾ ਵਿੱਚ। ਆਪਣਾ ਮਨੋਰੋਗ ਡਾਕਟਰ, 50 ਬੈੱਡ, ਤੇ ਸਟਾਫ਼ ਚੌਵੀ ਘੰਟੇ। ਦਾਖ਼ਲਾ ਰਾਤ ਨੂੰ ਵੀ ਹੋ ਸਕਦਾ ਹੈ। ਫ਼ੋਨ ਕਰੋ +91 83601 40700।

हिंदी में

श्री गंगानगर से काफ़ी परिवार हमारे पास आते हैं। हमारे दो केंद्र हैं, एक हनुमानगढ़ में और एक डरोली भाई, मोगा में। अपना मनोरोग डॉक्टर, 50 बेड, और स्टाफ़ चौबीस घंटे। दाख़िला रात में भी हो सकता है। फ़ोन करें +91 83601 40700।

Which parts of the district families come from

Sri Ganganagar city, and Padampur, Karanpur, Sadulshahar, Raisinghnagar, Anupgarh and Gharsana, along with the canal villages between them. Families from the Suratgarh side of the district can read the page written for them instead.

A district with Punjab on one side and the border on the other

Sri Ganganagar is not a Punjab district, but it shares a long edge with one, and supply does not stop at a signboard. Families here describe the same mix their cousins across the line describe, arriving a year or two later.

The other thing this district has is money. The canals made the land pay, and cash in the house is the quiet half of the problem. It is why a dependence here can run for years before anyone outside the family notices anything at all. Nobody had to sell land yet, so nobody had to admit anything yet.

Why families call us rather than trying again locally

What we hear on the phone from this district is almost always the same sentence. He was admitted somewhere, kept a few weeks, came home, and was back on it inside a month.

That happens for one reason. Only the body was treated.

Behind the drug there is very often depression, anxiety, sleep that stopped years ago, or something that happened once and was never spoken about again. If nobody treats that, the man walks out clean and comes back to the same mind he left with. Aasra has its own consultant psychiatrist on staff, Dr. Amanullah Ghori, M.B.B.S., DPM, not a visiting doctor. Most drug rehabilitation centres in this belt do not have one at all, and that single difference is the one families notice a year later.

Our centre at Hanumangarh

Of our two centres this is the one nearly every Sri Ganganagar family uses. It is residential, there is no appointment system, and you can come and look at the place before you decide anything, with the patient or without him. There is more detail on the Hanumangarh page.

The government route

If money is the problem, look at the government side first. Rajasthan runs de-addiction treatment through its district health services and has run its own rehabilitation schemes and detox camps, including in the period when the licensed outlets were being closed. What is available now, and what it costs, changes from time to time. Confirm the current position directly with the district hospital at Sri Ganganagar or the district health office rather than trusting anything you read online, including this page.

We will not talk you out of a free option you can actually reach. Families usually come to us after that route has been tried and the man has relapsed, or when they want somewhere that keeps him longer than a short detox admission allows.

What the treatment actually involves

About four months, residential throughout, in three stages.

• Medical detox under supervision, because the first week is the dangerous one. What detox involves.
• Counselling, daily, individual and in groups.
• Rehabilitation, the part most places skip. Routine, yoga, gym, sports, and enough time for the habit to lose its grip. The full programme.

Bringing someone who does not want to come

Almost nobody arrives here willingly. If he is refusing, that is not a reason to wait, it is the usual starting point.

Ring and tell us the whole situation, including the parts that are hard to say on the phone. We have handled this a few hundred times. Never plan it alone at the last minute, and never make a promise you cannot keep, because it costs you his trust for months afterwards.

Confidentiality

No name and no photograph leaves either centre without written permission from the family. The men in our video testimonials chose to speak. Most families do not, and that is completely normal. Nobody in Sri Ganganagar hears anything from us.