EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Two drug busts last week, 500 km apart on India’s west coast, gave us a measure of India’s narcotics problem. On September 15, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence unearthed one of India’s largest drug hauls— 3 tonnes of Afghan heroin estimated to be worth Rs 15,000 crore—from the Mundra port in Gujarat. A fortnight later, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrested a group of partygoers in Mumbai for consuming drugs. Among them was the son of a prominent movie star.
India has long had a drug problem; now, it seems to be growing. The country has become a significant consumption point from being a mere transhipment route for narcotics. An estimated 50 million Indians are believed to use drugs. That consumption might have only gone up during the pandemic due to the enhanced stress. The drug habit is fuelling crime, disrupting families and affecting the social fabric of the country. Moreover, drug dependence is a psycho-social-medical problem that can lead to accidents, violence and suicide.
That drug consumption is no longer a social stigma is worrisome. As S.N. Pradhan, the director-general of NCB, told us, “Consuming alcohol is no longer the in thing. If you are fashionable and ‘with it’, then you (should be seen) doing drugs.”
Massive regional shifts, meanwhile, have altered the dynamics of the trade. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan is a most ominous development.
The group is known to have profited from the drug business—Afghanistan accounts for over 80 per cent of the world’s illegal opium, which is refined into heroin and shipped globally. Given their precarious finances and limited sources of income, the Taliban could well turn their country into a narcostate. This cannot bode well for India, which has the world’s largest population of youngsters and a rising heroin habit. Drugs smuggled out of Afghanistan via Pakistan into India have spiked in the past two years. Last year, the Border Security Force recovered 507 kg of drugs in Punjab alone, more than all the seizures in 2018 and 2019. Such seizures, as the Mundra consignment showed us, are only the tip of the iceberg.
There are only rough estimates of the size of India’s illegal drug business. One government agency pegs it at around Rs 30,000 crore (extrapolating from the Rs 3,000 crore worth of drugs seized annually, and seizures making up roughly around 10 per cent of the trade). Anyway, the business is profitable enough for drug cartels to stay invested and take huge risks. Upping their game, the kingpins now run their empires from afar through a network of minions, the DarkNet to conduct transactions and couriers to reach the contraband to the addicts.
Close to 600 million people, or nearly half our population, are under 25, giving traffickers a captive market. The normalisation of drug use and growing willingness among youth to experiment with drugs adds to the cohort’s vulnerability.
Cocaine imported from South America and smuggled into India via sea and air routes continues to be a drug of choice for the country’s well-heeled. An estimated 1 million cocaine users in India can afford to pay upwards of Rs 5,000 a gram.
The poor are equally vulnerable. More than half of India’s drug consumers are believed to be from the poorest of the poor, consuming a range of cheap drugs from smack to brown sugar. Even more troubling is the fact that children are the most susceptible to the easy availability of drugs. Juvenile cases registered under the NDPS Act rose 21 per cent on-year to 264 in 2020 from only 123 in 2015 and 82 in 2010.
A drug rehabilitation centre we visited in the heart of Delhi had children as young as 10 years old being treated. They must have had turned addicts at an even younger age.
It is thus crucial that the government mechanism designed to fight the drugs menace be overhauled entirely. All counter-drug campaigns rest on three pillars—supply reduction or disrupting the supply of drugs, demand reduction or trying to get people not to want to take drugs, and harm reduction or ensuring the rehabilitation and recovery of drug addicts. We have a federal agency like the NCB, but it needs to be made more effective along the lines of a globally present organisation like the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Technology and drug-related intelligencegathering and analysis need to be prioritised. Counternarcotics campaigns must become a central part of our governance debate. In August 2020, the social justice and empowerment ministry launched a ‘Drugs Free India’ campaign targeting 272 districts in 32 states and Union territories with the highest drug consumption. The campaign claims to have reached out to 12 million people, including women and children. We need many more such initiatives.
We also need to re-examine certain provisions of the NDPS Act, which makes little distinction between the consumer, the street pedlar and the big drug dealer. As state capacities and resources are limited, the government needs to prioritise and go after the big fish rather than expend energy on chasing pedlars.
The government should also consider the legalisation of commonly consumed drugs like cannabis. It can earn states revenue as they do from tobacco and alcohol. This will allow enforcement agencies to focus on significant threats like heroin and cocaine.
Our cover story, ‘Heroin, the Deadly New High’, written by Managing Editor Sandeep Unnithan, looks at how the new narcotics threat has metastasised in recent months. Deputy Editor Kaushik Deka examines Assam’s war on drugs and Senior Associate Editor Kiran D. Tare looks at Mumbai’s worrying drug scene. There is very clearly a need to crack down on the drug menace before it gets out of hand.