It was an irresistible addiction to drug abuse that day by day has sucked his vitality, his future, dry. He failed to complete his university course and dropped out, and then started working at a firm as a graphic designer mainly to fuel his addiction.

"At first I took drugs just out of curiosity. I don't know exactly when I got hooked on the stuffs. After six years of nightmares, my family finally gave up on me, on trying to make me shake off drug addiction, and stopped supporting me. When my schoolmates saw the miseries I was in, abandoned by my family, they made me come here to quit drugs," Bipul said, sitting in the conference room of a drug rehabilitation centre in the city.

Unlike him, Jahanara, a 35-year-old housewife addicted to heroin, came to the rehab centre of her own volition and partly because of the repeated coaxing by her school-going daughter to quit the habit. Jahanara's drug abuse started 15 years ago, when she was in college. First she would take Phensedyl and then shifted to heroin. Despite trying time and again during the long 12 years of her married life, she could not get rid of the vice.

"A drug-pusher once saw my daughter with me, when I went to buy heroin. He gave me the address of this rehab centre and advised to get admitted to it," she said with tears of humility rolling down her cheeks.

No government agency including the Department of Narcotics Control (DNC) or non-government body knows the exact number of drug abusers in the country. The DNC is not even sure about the number of drug spots in the city.

"Since the independence, we haven't carried out any survey on drug abuse or drug dealing. But, we know drugs are available everywhere in the country -- from metropolises down to the upazilas and even at many of the villages," a DNC high official said.

However, according to a recent report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, the number of drug addicts in the country is not less than 4.3 million. The gigantic number of drug abusers is not the only scary thing; there are other and more sinister implications of drug addiction.

For instance, surveys have found a rapidly increasing prevalence of HIV/Aids among the injecting drug users (IDUs), many of whom are professional blood donors. So, the danger of HIV infection making a quick inroad into the general population is obvious, considering the country mainly relies on professional blood donors to meet its blood-transfusion needs.

In the recent past, the police wiped out a number of drug spots in the city but could not do away with drug dealing. Drug barons have invented alternative ways of drug pushing, like taking orders over cellphone and delivering the narcotics to clients at inconspicuous rendezvous.

Some new drugs also have joined the league. Yaba tablet and Sinkara syrup are being increasingly abused in addition to the popular drugs including cannabis, heroin, Phensedyl, hashish or charas, opium, sedatives and hallucinogenic pills, and Nalban in addition to the injecting drugs like pathedrin, morphine, Tidigesic, Monogesic and Bunogesic.

"You can also get the costlier drugs like Ecstasy tablet, cocaine and LSD in Dhaka. But they are really hard to get for a non-addict, who does not know the cocaine chain," said an addict coming from an affluent family who had recently enrolled in a rehab programme.

Contrary to the common perception that drug addicts mostly comprise of uneducated lower-class people and delinquent upper-class youths, people from almost all the professions are represented in the category.

"Apart from rickshaw-pullers, sex workers, petty criminals and students, many times we caught university teachers, government officials and employees, engineers, physicians, businessmen, musicians, journalists, policemen and so on taking drugs," said DNC Director Mofazzal Hossain.

A recent survey of CARE covering a number of districts revealed the age group of drug abusers ranges from 10 to 41 years.

"It's not only a crime but also a social disease that has seized people of all ages and all socio-economic classes," observed a teacher of psychology at the Dhaka University.

The disease set alarm bells ringing for the nation, when the sixth round of National HIV Serological Surveillance, 2004-05 reported that as high as 7.1 percent of the IDUs in the capital tested HIV positive. This was the highest HIV prevalence rate recorded so far among the vulnerable groups sampled, which experts consider to be a concentrated epidemic.

The survey report said approximately 44 percent of the female IDUs were street-based sex workers, some 82 percent of whom had shared needles/syringes while taking drugs in the previous six months. They constitute the group that has a direct HIV-transferring link with the general population.

The findings of the survey reiterate the warning issued by its forerunners that time is running out fast for Bangladesh to act to prevent the concentrated epidemic from spreading to other social sections and thus pull the nation out of the drug-HIV quicksand it is sinking into.