The only reason Achouba, a 16-year-old student based in Imphal in India’s northeast state of Manipur, ever considered what he describes as the “power booster drug” was to ensure that he could stay up nights on end to beat his own score in the violent video game Doom.
“My classmate would swear by it and I could literally see how it worked for him because he even looked fresher,” he told VICE, speaking in Manipuri. “Maybe it was just all the caffeine – I don’t know. But if a pill worth Rs 250 ($3) can keep you up for days without any debilitating side effects, what’s the worst that can happen?”
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Achouba is talking about the World is Yours or WY – also referred to as Ya ba which is also a mixture of meth and caffeine – which is a popular drug across Southeast Asian countries. Also known as “biker’s coffee,” “bhool bhulaiya” and the “madness drug,” these multi-coloured pills with the letters WY imprinted on them, and were first said to have been developed by Hitler’s army to keep soldiers up for nights on end during the Second World War. This also led to the rise of the moniker “Nazi Speed.”
According to the Justice Department of the United States, the side effects of WY are common to most methamphetamine-based drugs: rapid heart rate, increased blood pressure, and damage to the small blood vessels in the brain that can lead to stroke. So, Achouba was wrong about the wonders of WY because chronic use of the drug can result in inflammation of the heart lining and overdosing can cause hyperthermia (elevated body temperature), convulsions, and death. There have been cases where users have experienced recurrent episodes of violent behaviour, paranoia, anxiety, confusion, and insomnia.
In 2015, VICE News reported on the new routes that World is Yours is finding across Southeast Asia, particularly India’s neighbour in the east, Bangladesh. A consignment of more than 1.5 million World is Yours tablets, street value of around $10.6 million, was seized during the early hours of February 5 in 2015 from a trawler approaching Bangladesh’s main seaport at Chittagong, thus highlighting the sea as a common smuggling route for the tablets.
India’s northeastern states, particularly Manipur, are the gateway to most Southeast Asian nations and thus end up being on the frontline of the “madness drug” trade routes. In December 2022, WY tablets worth Rs 24 crore ($290,000) were seized from the Moreh town of Manipur, the town bordering Myanmar.
But to what extent does World is Yours percolate into the lives of the youth from India’s northeastern state battling historic unemployment, inflation, weak civic infrastructure and fears of growing insurgency from militants? Is the madness of the madness drug poised to take on the world’s second-most (or most, depending on which reports you believe) populous country?
The lonely battle
All his life, Sadam Hanjabam has grappled with demons that he never really could figure out how to get the better of. In 2019, he shared his story with VICE of falling into India’s chemsex scene (a term used for queer male sex parties often fuelled by the usage of mephedrone, and crystal meth), overdosing and nearly losing his life in the ordeal.
He lived to tell his tale, and worked on an organisation for queer welfare, with special emphasis on transgender men. His story was featured on Oprah and Prince Harry’s mental health show, The Me You Can’t See, for Apple TV+. His organisation, Ya-all, even founded India’s first football team of transgender men that were selected to compete globally in the Gay Games of Hong Kong.
But the scourge of World is Yours in Manipur is unlike any drug epidemic Hanjabam has ever seen or experienced before. It has affected some of his closest friends, too — some of them refuse to speak to anyone, even for this story, solely because they don’t want to relive the horrors of WY in any form. A year back, Hanjabam’s Ya-all started the first deaddiction centre for transgender men, known as Rainbow Trust, in collaboration with the social welfare department of the state government of Manipur.
“We started Rainbow Trust for trans men with the express purpose of raising awareness about drugs, particularly such as World is Yours because of how easily accessible and cheap it is, sometimes for even as low as Rs 100. This is in stark contrast to its high prices in big cities like Mumbai and Delhi,” Hanjabam said “Unfortunately, young people don’t really like to know what exactly they are getting into because they are experimental and if it promises them the bare minimum and delivers precisely what they want, nothing really matters.”
The trust caters mostly to queer people because of the intersection of queerness with mental health. The government support came because of Ya-all’s proven track record in the field of trans welfare, getting acknowledged globally for the football team and massive, targeted campaigns around HIV prevention. Since its inception in April 2022, Hanjabam says the Rainbow Trust has registered 24 cases related to WY, mostly in young people between the ages of 15-25. The reasons range from an identity crisis arising from queerness to unemployment to stress caused due to political conflicts.
Nitu Sanasam, who identifies as queer, is the primary mental health counsellor at the Rainbow Trust. She explains that the Rainbow Trust strives to alter the negative thoughts of patients, share ways to cope with daily activities, and also work in tandem with nurses and doctors to detox medically.
“Before registering as a centre, this was a shelter home for transgender people in distress,” Sanasam said. “We must understand that queer people fall for drugs because they are misunderstood at home, they grapple with their identity, and then the thoughts trickle in on how perhaps there can be a momentary escape in drugs such as World is Yours. The easy and cheap availability [of the drug] doesn’t make it easy, either.”
Sanasam said that it wasn’t easy being queer in Manipur. She was in a toxic relationship at the same time she was trying to make better sense of her identity – and having to deal with both these concerns simultaneously was challenging. But counselling helped. It averted what could have been a major crisis in her life.
Counselling first
Silpaprity Wangkhem, who works as a nurse at Ya-all, told VICE that the approach of filling the system with detox pills is not an approach that the Rainbow Trust encourages: “The priority, always, is counselling, and not the detox pills. Because it takes a lot of effort to help the individual change their perspective. There is also a fear in people when it comes to taking any pills to detox in the rehab because of the terrible experiences they have had.”
Sanna, who preferred not to reveal his real name, was forcefully put in a rehab centre for women by his parents. He came out as a transgender man only after signing up at the Rainbow Trust.
“The control continued well after I entered that rehab centre for men, where I was put on medication that didn’t work for me, against my consent,” he told VICE. “When I would protest, they would put me in solitary confinement and the abuse was way worse than the nightmares that would arise from the WY pills. I had also been diagnosed with bipolar personality condition and was misdiagnosed for the same.”
The way Hanjabam sees it, the only way the spread of WY can be curbed is by emphasising psychosocial support that is affirmative, not solely following the “biomedical model of detox pills,” raising awareness in young users and adopting a queer-affirmative approach to therapy.
As with many things affecting this part of the country, the scourge of WY remains ignored by the country at large. Perhaps the drug has not reached Bollywood celebrities enough to merit primetime news debates.
