The Climate Crisis Is Driving People to Substance Abuse
Kamal Sonavane knew she’d pass out if she chewed smokeless tobacco one more time. It was a scorching April afternoon in the middle of another of India’s brutal heat waves, and with no job to go to, the farmworker had already chewed tobacco five times that day. “Even an addicted person avoids doing this in extreme heat because there’s a risk of fainting,” she says.Yet Sonavane repeated the familiar ritual: adding the slaked lime to the tobacco leaves, then putting the mixture in her mouth. “I would have anyway collapsed, either because of the heat waves or the mounting stress,” she says, sitting in her two-room brick house in Bhadole in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Anxious about money, her lack of work, and the extreme heat, she turned to the tobacco once again.Climate change is making...