Police say 9,105 children have been arrested for drug-related offences in less than eleven months – 8,931 boys and 173 girls. It is a startling measure of how deeply drugs have penetrated Sri Lankan society. But before celebrating the number of arrests, the country needs to know who these children are, what they were arrested for and what happened to them afterwards.
One statistic released by Sri Lanka Police on Friday deserves to stop the country in its tracks. Since the Government’s intensified national anti-drug operation began on October 30 last year, 9,105 children have been arrested for drug-related offences.
Police say 8,931 of them were boys and 173 were girls. The figures were disclosed by Police Media Spokesman ASP F.U. Wootler during a briefing on the Government’s “Rata Ekata” national anti-drug operation.
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There appears to be a discrepancy of one in the gender breakdown released publicly – 8,931 boys and 173 girls total 9,104 rather than the stated 9,105 arrests. It is a small numerical inconsistency against a much larger and more troubling number, but Police should clarify it.
More important is what the figure of 9,105 actually represents. The publicly reported statistics do not provide an age breakdown, distinguish children arrested for possession or personal drug use from those accused of dealing or trafficking, or explain how many were subsequently charged, diverted into treatment, rehabilitated or released.
Those distinctions are crucial because a child selling narcotics for an organised criminal network, a teenager experimenting with a drug and a drug-dependent young person carrying a small quantity for personal use may all appear within a headline statistic describing “drug-related offences”. Their circumstances, culpability and the interventions required are plainly not identical.
The Police figures nevertheless provide disturbing evidence of the scale of Sri Lanka’s problem. Authorities say raids conducted between October 30, 2025 and this week have resulted in seizures exceeding 2,277 kilograms of heroin, 3,172 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, 293 kilograms of cocaine and 9,512 kilograms of cannabis.
Police have also linked drug addiction to deaths by suicide, saying 175 people died in such circumstances during 2025 and another 11 drug-related deaths have been recorded so far this year. Those figures underline why the State is entitled – and obliged – to confront narcotics trafficking aggressively.
But children require another layer of consideration.
The Government’s own anti-drug strategy is not supposed to consist solely of enforcement. Police descriptions of the “Rata Ekata” campaign have included reducing drug demand, rehabilitation of people dependent upon drugs, prevention programmes and community empowerment alongside operations against supply and trafficking.
The National Dangerous Drugs Control Board similarly identifies treatment and rehabilitation of drug-dependent people among its principal responsibilities. That makes the fate of these 9,105 children a legitimate measure of whether the national campaign is functioning as a comprehensive drug policy rather than simply an arrest programme.
The issue has become still more immediate as Police move into schools. Inspector General of Police Priyantha Weerasuriya said last week that schools should seek Police assistance, including officers and sniffer dogs, where narcotics are suspected, while also calling upon parents and teachers to remain vigilant.
Keeping narcotics away from schools is plainly necessary. But the revelation that more than 9,000 children have already been arrested makes it equally necessary to distinguish between the children whom the State must protect from drug dealers and young people who have themselves become part of the distribution chain.
There is another uncomfortable possibility. Children can be attractive to organised criminal networks precisely because they are vulnerable, inexpensive and easier to manipulate. If adults are using minors to transport, store or sell narcotics, arresting the child without identifying the adult behind that child risks removing the smallest and most replaceable link in the chain.
That is why the next Police disclosure should go considerably further than the arrest total. Sri Lanka needs to know the ages of the children, the offences alleged against them, the quantities involved, how many were repeat offenders, how many were drug-dependent, how many entered rehabilitation and how many cases led investigators to adult suppliers.
Nine thousand one hundred and five arrests can be presented as evidence of an energetic Police operation. It can equally be read as evidence of an enormous social failure.
The difference lies in what happened to those children after they were arrested.
Sri Lanka should certainly wage war against the people who make fortunes selling narcotics to its young. But when the person standing on the other side of the police desk is a child, the country’s first question cannot simply be what offence did you commit?
