Not my child

Recently there has been much talk about the abuse of drugs amongst school-going children of Dhaka, especially a segment that opts for a certain medium of education. Every time we as citizens encounter situations that reveal the putrid state of our social order we indulge in a blame game that points fingers at the affluent classes. The reality, however, could not be more different.
Denial is a common defence mechanism.  We readily accept the fact that the child next door may be suffering from a psychological and drug problem, but fail to even think for a second that our ward may be sharing a similar problem.
Studies have shown that a great segment of the population suffers from psychiatric problems in one form or the other and a significant section of that population are drug abusers. The situation is made acute due to the lack of professional care-givers for this population. In teenagers the condition may start as mere consumption of tobacco or a casual puff of marijuana but beyond our careful, watchful eyes, children are now more exposed to drugs than we ever were.
As a society we must come out of the delusion that evil spews only from the upper echelons of society. Drug abuse is so rampant in society that no stratum is now free from its evil grasp. To deny that the problem exists may prove to be the cause of our downfall in the near future.
It is of utmost importance that we act now as a society to fight this malice. There is a fine line between intrusion of privacy and a watchful eye, and our young parents must now learn to strike this very balance.
Our distorted reality takes us to a society where only the rich and the poor face drug problems. Narcotics are a very real problem, in all schools and educational institutions. To deny such facts will be suicidal.