Indian stoners face a moral crusade
▪︎Puritans fret that cannabis-crazed actors are corrupting the nation’s youth
One might expect India to be at peace with marijuana. Before time itself, the god Shiva is supposed to have discovered the stuff. He sits high in a mythical Himalayan abode, eating gobs of it while pondering the mysteries of the universe; so do religious mendicants who emulate him today. Victorian India exported ganja to Jamaica with indentured labourers in the first half of the 19th century, long before the West surrendered to its mellow charms. But this monsoon season, moralists have raised the alarm: cannabis-crazed Bollywood stars are corrupting India’s youth.
The Indian media went to war with the killer weed in September while the Narcotics Control Bureau (ncb) and other law-enforcement agencies rolled out a series of pretexts to hold Rhea Chakraborty, a Bollywood starlet, in jail for a month—ultimately for having procured marijuana for her boyfriend, a better-known actor who committed suicide in June. In poring over Ms Chakraborty’s private communications, investigators connected her to other dissolute young actors, including the a-lister Deepika Padukone, who discussed “doob” over WhatsApp. “The ground is ready for a Bollywood clean-up,” thunders a journalist friendly to the government, connecting the film industry’s supposed “drug obsession” with ills as diverse as “smuggling, sex rackets, terrorism [and] killing wildlife”.
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