Alcoholism and Drug Addiction as a Social Problem in India

Substance Abuse as a Social Fact, Not Just an Individual Failing

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• Alcoholism and drug addiction are conventionally treated as medical or moral failures of the individual — a matter of weak willpower or biochemical dependence. Sociology insists on a different starting point: patterns of substance use are never randomly distributed across a population, they cluster tightly by class, caste, gender, region, and life stage, and that patterning is itself the object of sociological explanation.
  • The World Health Organization defines dependence as a cluster of behavioural, cognitive, and physiological symptoms that develop after repeated substance use, including a compulsion to use, difficulty controlling use, and continued use despite harm — but sociology’s interest lies less in the physiology of dependence and more in why certain groups, at certain historical moments, are pushed toward substances as a response to their social situation.
  • Treating addiction purely as an individual pathology has a real social cost: it locates the problem entirely inside the addicted person, obscures the structural conditions (unemployment, displacement, caste humiliation, marketing by a profit-seeking liquor industry) that produce addiction at a population scale, and shifts policy attention toward punishment or individual treatment rather than structural reform.
• Both alcohol and narcotic drugs also occupy a distinctive dual position in Indian society: alcohol is legal, licensed, taxed, and in many regions culturally embedded (including ritual and ceremonial use in several tribal societies), while most narcotic and psychotropic substances are criminalised outright under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985 — meaning the two halves of “substance abuse” sit under sharply different legal and moral regimes even though their social roots and consequences substantially overlap.

The Scale of the Problem: What Recent Data Shows

• The National Survey on Extent and Pattern of Substance Use in India (2019), conducted by the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre at AIIMS for the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, remains the most authoritative national picture: alcohol is by far the most commonly used psychoactive substance, consumed by roughly 14-15% of the population aged 10 to 75, with a stark gender skew — about 27.3% of men against just 1.6% of women report alcohol use.
  • The states with the highest reported prevalence of alcohol use include Chhattisgarh, Tripura, Punjab, Arunachal Pradesh, and Goa — a spread that itself signals multiple distinct social pathways into use (tribal/ritual consumption in parts of the Northeast and central India, agrarian distress and cross-border trafficking in Punjab, tourism-driven availability in Goa).
  • Cannabis and opioids are the next most common categories nationally, with opioid dependence showing sharp regional concentration — Punjab and parts of the North-East report opioid-use prevalence several times the national average, tied closely to cross-border trafficking routes and, in Punjab’s case, a documented crisis among unemployed rural youth.
• NFHS-5 data corroborates the gender pattern seen in the AIIMS survey and adds an age dimension: alcohol and tobacco use rises sharply through adolescence into young adulthood, with usage among young men consistently far higher than among young women across nearly every state surveyed.
• These are not marginal numbers by absolute count: even a “modest” double-digit national prevalence rate for alcohol translates into well over 100 million users, and the same survey estimated several million people nationally as dependent users of one substance or another requiring treatment — a burden that concentrates disproportionately in poor and marginalised households where the economic and family costs of dependence are least absorbable.

Sociological Theories Explaining Substance Abuse

Strain and Anomie Perspectives

• Durkheim’s concept of anomie — a state of normlessness that accompanies rapid, disorienting social change — offers one of the oldest sociological entry points into substance abuse: when established norms regulating aspiration and conduct break down faster than new ones can take hold (as happens under rapid urbanisation, migration, or the collapse of a traditional livelihood), individuals lose the normative moorings that would otherwise regulate their behaviour, including their relationship to intoxicants.
• Merton sharpened this into a more specific mechanism through his strain theory: society holds out culturally approved goals (wealth, success, stability) while unequally distributing the legitimate means to reach them; where the gap between goal and means is widest, individuals adapt in patterned ways.
  • Merton’s retreatist adaptation — rejecting both the culturally prescribed goals and the institutionalised means to pursue them — maps directly onto addiction: rather than continuing to strive within a system perceived as closed to them, or turning to crime as an alternative (illegitimate) means, the retreatist withdraws from the struggle altogether, and substance dependence is one of the clearest empirical forms this withdrawal takes.
  • This lens fits the well-documented link between agrarian distress and alcoholism in India: farmers facing chronic indebtedness, crop failure, and a sense that no legitimate path leads out of their situation show markedly elevated rates of alcohol dependence, often compounding — rather than merely coexisting with — the same distress that drives farmer suicides.

Learning and Interactionist Perspectives

• Sutherland’s theory of differential association argues that deviant behaviour, including substance use, is learned through interaction with others — an individual becomes prone to using drugs or alcohol not because of some inherent trait but because they are embedded in social networks (peer groups, workplace cultures, sometimes even family) where favourable definitions of substance use outweigh unfavourable ones.
  • This explains why substance use often clusters so tightly by peer group and locality: it spreads through networks of intimate association much like any other learned social practice, which is also why peer-group-based prevention and de-addiction interventions have proven more effective than purely individual counselling.
• Howard Becker’s labeling theory adds a second interactionist layer: once society formally labels someone an “addict” or “alcoholic,” that label becomes a master status overriding the person’s other social identities (worker, parent, neighbour), triggering exclusion from employment, family trust, and community standing — pushing the labelled individual further into the very subculture of use that the label was meant to stigmatise, a process Becker calls secondary deviance.

Conflict and Political-Economy Perspectives

• A Marxist reading treats substance abuse as one expression of alienation under capitalist production — workers estranged from the product, process, and social meaning of their labour seek escape through intoxication, a pattern most visible among industrial and migrant labour working under precarious, exhausting conditions with little control over their work.
• This perspective also foregrounds the political economy of supply: the liquor industry (and, in illegal markets, drug trafficking networks) has a direct commercial interest in sustaining demand, and state governments themselves derive substantial excise revenue from alcohol sales — creating a structural tension between the state’s stated public-health goal of reducing consumption and its fiscal dependence on the same trade.

Family Disorganisation and Socialization

• Where the family — sociology’s primary agency of socialisation — is itself disrupted by poverty, migration, domestic conflict, or a substance-using parent, children are both more likely to be exposed to early substance use and less likely to receive the consistent guidance that would otherwise discourage it, producing a documented intergenerational transmission of substance dependence within particular households and communities.

Social Factors Specific to the Indian Context

• Caste and tribal dimensions cut in two different directions at once. In many tribal societies, alcohol (commonly home-brewed, such as mahua or rice beer) has a long-standing ritual and ceremonial function, integrated into festivals and social exchange rather than treated as deviant — but colonial and post-colonial commercial liquor contractors historically exploited this cultural acceptance, and continuing poverty and marginalisation among many tribal communities have converted what was once a regulated ritual practice into a channel for chronic dependence.
• Migration and urban precarity: rural-to-urban migrant labourers, disconnected from family and community oversight and working under harsh, insecure conditions, show consistently higher rates of substance use than settled urban populations — a pattern consistent with both the anomie and alienation readings above.
• Affluence-linked substance use represents a distinct, growing strand: synthetic drugs and party drugs circulating among urban, upper-middle-class youth are driven less by economic desperation than by peer culture, availability, and status signalling — meaning India today carries what public-health researchers describe as a “double burden”, with poverty-driven and affluence-driven pathways into substance use operating simultaneously but through very different social mechanisms.
• Illicit and “hooch” liquor remains a specifically Indian tragedy pattern: periodic mass poisoning deaths from methanol-adulterated illicit liquor, almost always among the poorest consumers priced out of the legal, taxed liquor market, expose how prohibition or high taxation policy — however well-intentioned — can push the poorest users toward the most dangerous, unregulated supply.

Social Consequences

• Family and domestic consequences: a strong, well-documented association exists between alcohol/substance dependence and domestic violence, marital breakdown, and child neglect — dependence in a primary earner also frequently drags a household into debt and poverty, reversing whatever economic gains the family had made.
• Health and mortality burden: liver disease, cardiovascular illness, overdose deaths, and — where injecting drug use is involved — elevated HIV and Hepatitis C transmission risk.
• Economic costs: lost workplace productivity, workplace accidents, and diversion of already-scarce household income toward sustaining dependence rather than nutrition, education, or savings.
• Crime and public order: a documented association between substance dependence and both petty crime (theft to fund a habit) and road-traffic accidents, alongside the criminal ecosystem that illegal drug trafficking itself sustains.

Policy and Institutional Response

• The NDPS Act, 1985 remains the primary legal instrument criminalising the production, possession, sale, and trafficking of narcotic and psychotropic substances, with penalties scaled to the quantity involved; its rigid, largely punitive framework has drawn sustained criticism from public-health researchers for treating drug users (as opposed to traffickers) as criminals first and patients second, a stance more recent policy discussion has begun to push back against in favour of a harm-reduction approach.
• The National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction (NAPDDR), run by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment since 2018 and aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals on substance-abuse prevention (SDG 3.5) and organised-crime reduction (SDG 16.4), is India’s principal demand-side (as opposed to purely enforcement-side) response, delivered through a network of Integrated Rehabilitation Centres for Addicts (IRCA), Community-based Peer-Led Interventions (CPLI), Outreach and Drop-in Centres (ODIC), and Addiction Treatment Facilities (ATF), coordinated by State-Level Coordinating Agencies and backed by a national toll-free helpline (14446).
  • By late 2024, this network included 347 functional IRCAs and 46 CPLI centres, with beneficiaries served under the scheme nearly doubling from roughly 3.4 lakh in 2022-23 to about 6.5 lakh in 2024-25 — a scale-up that reflects both expanding outreach and a genuinely large underlying demand for treatment.
  • The complementary Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan (“Drug-Free India Campaign”) targets the most vulnerable districts identified through the AIIMS survey with focused community-level awareness and outreach.
• Harm-reduction measures — needle-exchange programmes and opioid substitution therapy for injecting drug users — mark a partial policy shift from a purely abstinence-and-punishment model toward one that also tries to minimise the health harms of continued use, particularly HIV transmission risk.
• State-level prohibition experiments (full alcohol prohibition in Bihar and Gujarat, among others) illustrate a recurring sociological critique of supply-side bans: prohibition tends to displace consumption into an unregulated illicit market rather than eliminating it, generates exactly the kind of adulterated “hooch” liquor tragedies discussed above, deprives the state of both regulatory oversight and excise revenue, and — echoing the labeling-theory point above — falls enforcement-wise disproportionately on poor consumers rather than the wealthier drinkers who can more easily access alternative, cross-border, or black-market supply.