MAXIMUM CITY, MAXIMUM WORRY
CELEBRITY DRUG BUSTS AND A WELL-OILED INTERNATIONAL TRAFFICKING NETWORK HIGHLIGHT A GROWING PROBLEM IN MUMBAI
On October 2, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) conducted raids at Mumbai’s international cruise terminal just as some 1,000 guests were about to board a Goabound ship of the Cordelia Cruises company. Most of the guests were from the north Indian states, flown in by a Delhibased company. Entry tickets apparently ranged from Rs 80,000 to Rs 3 lakh. The cruise ship was on the third leg of an international voyage.
The NCB officers, led by zonal director Sameer Wankhede, boarded the cruise ship as guests after a tipoff from a drug pedlar about a rave party being organised onboard. While conducting searches, they zeroed in on eight people, including Aryan Khan, 23, son of Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan, and his friends Arbaaz Merchant and Munmun
Dhamecha. The agency did not find any drugs in Aryan’s possession but claims he was under the influence. Aryan and Arbaaz had been given free VIP passes by the cruise company, hoping they would spread the word about the ship.
Till October 5, the NCB had arrested 16 people in the case, including four associated with an event management company. Aryan and his friends have been booked under Sections 27 (punishment for consumption of any narcotic drug or psychotropic substance), 8C (production, manufacture, possession, sale or purchase of drugs) and other relevant provisions of the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. The NCB claims it recovered 13 gm of cocaine, 5 gm MD (mephedrone),
21 gm charas and 22 pills of MDMA (synthetic drug
An officer with the narcotics wing of Mumbai Police claims the city consumes 500 kg of marijuana every month. The total illegal drugs market is said to be worth Rs 500 crore annually
methylenedioxymethamphetamine) from some of Aryan’s friends. If the charges are proved, they might face jail for a year. “Aryan was a surprise catch for us,” says an NCB officer. “When we apprehended him, we did not know he was SRK’s son.” Khan’s lawyer Satish Maneshinde has refuted reports that his client had even consumed drugs. The case against Aryan seems to rest on purported WhatsApp chats he had with a drug pedlar.
It was actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide on June 14, 2020 that brought the focus on the use of drugs by Mumbai’s wellheeled. The actor’s phone records showed that he had been in contact with a number of drug dealers. The October 2 arrests seem to indicate that drugs continue to be easily available in Mumbai. The NCB had made a number of highprofile arrests in the course of the Rajput case. It recently filed a 50,000page chargesheet in the case which tries to paint a picture of an unholy nexus between Bollywood actors, their friends and the drug pedlars.
An officer with the narcotics wing of Mumbai Police claims the city consumes 500 kg of marijuana every month. The total illegal drugs market is said to be worth Rs 500 crore annually. Mumbai is considered a safe landing point for drugs and, combined with political patronage, has always been a magnet for the business.
Since September 2020, the NCB has registered 114 cases under the NDPS Act and arrested more than 300 people, including 34 foreigners and a few Bollywood stars for drugs consumption and peddling. The NCB claims it has so far dismantled 12 drug syndicates and recovered drugs worth Rs 150 crore from Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Thane and other parts of Maharashtra. Mumbai’s swish set continues to drive demand and high retail prices. A gram of cocaine costs Rs 5,000 in Mumbai, almost double what it costs in Goa, say police officials. At least 2,499 kg of cocaine seized in the past two years in Sri Lanka, Port Elizabeth and Panama was bound for India, say NCB records. It also says that close to 300 kg of cocaine landed in Mumbai in December 2018 through a syndicate that has links in Australia and Canada. The drugs were not seized. Drugs smuggling is an enormously lucrative business—a kg of cocaine goes for Rs 5 crore in the international market.
The police have also noticed a changing pattern in drugs consumption. The consumption of MDMA has reached alarming levels in Mumbai and Goa.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) of the ruling Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi alliance government has accused the NCB of adopting a “selective approach”. Party spokesperson Nawab Malik says the agency is only targeting the nonBJPruled states. But Wankhede refutes the allegation. “Our main aim is to dismantle organised drug syndicates. We don’t have an agenda against anyone,” he says.
On June 17, a small team of police personnel from Khatkhati police station in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district lay in wait of a “queen” at Janak Pukhuri, a small village bordering Nagaland. This wasn’t a receiving party for royalty, though. They were waiting for Th. Paone, the “queen” of a drug empire. Though unsure if she would venture out on her own from her den in Nagaland’s Dimapur, a mere 10 km away from Janak Pukhuri, the police hoped that their bait—an order through a decoy customer for a large consignment of drugs— would prove to be too enticing to ignore. By this time, the police had put in nearly three months of work to penetrate Paone’s inner circle.
She eventually did arrive with 164 packets of heroin worth Rs 7 crore in a modest Maruti Alto. Dressed in traditional Manipuri attire, the soft-speaking, slightlybuilt Paone barely looked the part of a dreaded drug queen. But this 50-year-old was responsible for 60 per cent of all illegal drugs entering Assam via NH 36—connecting Dimapur and Nagaon in Assam—and NH 39, connecting Manipur’s Moreh and Assam’s Numaligarh.
Paone is among the 2,730 drug lords operating in the northeastern states who were arrested by the Assam police during a special drive against drugs launched after Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma took charge of the state in May. Within the first 100 days, the police had seized narcotics worth Rs 198 crore. The state has recorded a 65 per cent rise in the number of drug-related arrests in the first eight months of 2021 over the last year. However, the state government believes this might just be the tip of the iceberg. “If we assume the seized drug was just 10 per cent of the entire quantity smuggled into Assam, we can say that the trade in illegal drugs in the state is worth nearly Rs 5,000 crore annually,” says Sarma.
A 2019 study by two JNU professors, based on the National Family Health Survey 2015–2016 (NFHS-4), found that, at 70.8 per cent, the prevalence of substance abuse among northeastern men is 20 percentile points higher than the rest of India. The region accounts for 8 per cent of India’s total geographical area but 41 of the country’s 272 districts vulnerable to drug addiction are in this region.
This addiction is leading to an alarming rise in HIV cases in the northeast—the trend of intravenous use of drugs among those between 15 and 20 years being the key factor. A report by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) last year found that the AIDSrelated mortality per 100,000 population in India was estimated to be the highest in Manipur (36.86), followed by Mizoram (28.34) and Nagaland (26.20).
At the root of this drug menace is the region’s geographical proximity to Myanmar which, along with Lao PDR and Thailand, belongs to the Golden Triangle of the drug trade. Northeast India shares a 1,643 km border with Myanmar, responsible for 95 per cent of the total opium production in the triangle and, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, 80 per cent of the heroin production in Southeast Asia and 60 per cent of the world’s supply. As per the International Narcotics Control Board and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Myanmar is also one of Asia’s main sources of illegal production of methamphetamine, or the “crazy drug” Yaba. Moreover, Myanmar supplying opium has led to a massive prevalence of opioid use in Northeast India. In states like Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram, over 20 per cent of the total population has used opioids at least once in a year, as opposed to the national average of just over 2 per cent, as per a 2019 report, ‘Magnitude of Substance Use in India’.
Since 2018, the recovery of heroin has seen a surge of 485 per cent; the police seized 380 per cent more opium during the same period and more than 8 million Yaba tablets have been recovered in Assam in the past four years.
From Myanmar, narcotic substances reach Assam via various routes originating mostly in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. The Assam government even claimed that a drug nexus operating in Mizoram had a role in the territorial clash between the two neighbouring states in August so as to divert the Assam Police’s attention from the narcotics trade. Mizoram has denied the charge and claimed it made record seizures of methamphetamine earlier this year. However, there is an acknowledgement that Mizoram, with its shared borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh, makes it an easy transit route. Some drug producers also use the remote areas of Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh for opium cultivation. Several mafia groups from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have also begun cultivating opium in Assamese districts like Barpeta, South Salmara and Kamrup. Since May, Assam Police has destroyed cannabis growing in 31 bighas of land and opium in 15 bighas.
Assam, though, is not the destination of the drug trade. Only a fifth of the drugs entering or produced in Assam are sold in the state. According to police sources, the state is used as a transit point by traffickers transporting drugs to other parts of India and to Bangladesh. And that’s what makes the Assam government’s drive against drugs significant beyond the geographical borders of the state. While it has found massive public support, the state police force has also earned some scepticism. Several critics have pointed out that Assam’s low conviction rate in drug cases—just over one per cent against the national 42 per cent—is a big hurdle. A Rajya Sabha answer in 2020 revealed that only 10 of the 1,237 individuals arrested in 2019 were convicted. But Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, director general of Assam Police, believes that the situation is set to improve dramatically. The police force is working on multiple corrective measures, such as the creation of four model FIRs to handle different situations of search, seizure and arrest, comprehensive training for investigating officers, circulation of detailed guidelines in all police stations and monitoring all drug-related cases by top level officers.
But there are other worrying factors. The arrest of two police personnel, including a deputy superintendent of police, for their alleged involvement with drug traffickers, has led many to believe that the current operations are just targeting small players as the arrest of the kingpins may expose the nexus between the drug cartel and top officials. One police officer recounted how two of the most notorious drug lords in Badarpur and Patharkandi in Karimganj district, bordering Mizoram, have escaped the police despite adequate evidence against them. Even an internal report of Assam police acknowledges this possibility: “These arrests are an indication that there is a nexus between a section of law enforcement officials in these illegal activities…”. Mahanta, however, is confident in his plans. “That we are not sparing even our own is a straight message to anyone involved in this heinous crime,” he says.
In fact, to send a larger sociopolitical message, the Assam government conducted a two-day-long drugs disposal event at four locations in the state—Diphu, Golaghat, Nagaon and Hojai—all transit points for distribution of narcotics. Seized drugs worth Rs 170 crore were destroyed, with the CM himself setting them on fire. “There have been instances when seized drugs have made way to drug traffickers. By destroying these, the government has preempted that. It’s also sending out a larger message,” says a senior leader of the ruling BJP. While such spectacles may have earned the government social and political mileage, the success of the war against drugs in Assam will depend on sustained and transparent action.
Since Himanta Biswa Sarma took over as chief minister in May, the Assam Police has arrested 2,730 drug lords operating in the northeastern states
eventually slowing down the brain and central nervous system. Sustained heroin usage damages the heart and lungs. “Heroin turns people into vegetables,” says Dr Rajesh Kumar.
Highly-priced South American cocaine continues to be the drug of choice for a limited circle of high-society addicts. In April, the NCB called Mumbai the cocaine capital of India. The agency said that drug mafias from Nigeria and South American countries like Peru, Brazil and Chile were spreading their tentacles in India, especially in Mumbai. In August, the NCB busted a ‘dial-a-drug’ network being run at Palghar near Mumbai. The call centre was being operated from Nigeria. Customers got doorstep delivery of cocaine after paying online.
THE COUNTER-NARCOTICS TRIANGLE
A revenue-starved Afghanistan is perched at edge of the precipice of becoming a narco-state where the illegal drug trade permeates legitimate institutions. Indian drug control authorities believe the situation could worsen with more drug shipments coming in. A senior government official admits that the capacities of the states and Centre are severely limited when it comes to handling a drugs surge. He suggests the creation of a national drug management authority headquartered in Delhi with stakeholders right up to the district level for a coordinated war on drugs.
All global counter-narcotics campaigns rest on three pillars—supply reduction or disrupting the supply of drugs, demand reduction or trying to get people to go off drugs and harm reduction or ensuring the rehabilitation and recovery of drug addicts.
The NCB—the primary agency tasked with combating a transnational threat like drug trafficking—needs to be made more effective along the lines of a globally-deployed organisation like the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Technology and drug-related intelligence-gathering and analysis need to be beefed up to monitor drug shipments into India. The bureau sorely needs technical experts to monitor the DarkNet where the bulk of the drug deals take place. It needs to warn of new threats and patterns in the drug trade.
The UNODC report warns how Afghanistan is also becoming a major source for methamphetamine in the region. MDMA, also known as crystal meth, a powerful and highly addictive stimulant, is made in small clandestine laboratories and sells for Rs 2,700 a gram in India. It has displaced cocaine as the drug of choice among the wellheeled in certain metros.
Ajay Agnihotri, a former IRS official, says the drug agencies need to monitor major supply routes. “We need field intelligence from Afghanistan. The problem is that the DRI and the NCB have more staff in New York, London and Singapore than in places where we need boots on the ground,” he says.
Given the scarce resources available to the government, experts say the priority should be to nab the big fish in the trade and go after problem drugs like MDMA, heroin and cocaine, not chasing pedlars. The Mundra smuggling network, for instance, was being monitored by an Afghan-origin kingpin based in Shimla with a network of associates across the country. (He is now in police custody and the case is being investigated by the NIA). Romesh Bhattacharjee, a former DG of NCB, says this refocus can come about only when drugs like cannabis are decriminalised. “You have to change laws—you have to legalise consumption of plant-grown drugs. The government must distribute them so that there is no incentive left for smugglers and traffickers.” A study of over 25,000 persons prosecuted under the NDPS Act in Punjab between 2001 and 2011 found that barely a dozen were traffickers, the rest were small pedlars and users.
Supply reduction must go hand in hand with another crucial side of the triangle—public awareness campaigns to reduce demand and make drugs less desirable. Last August, the Union ministry of social justice and empowerment launched a ‘Drugs Free India’ campaign targeting 272 districts that had the highest drug consumption. The campaign claims to have reached out to 120 million people, including women and children. A government-run helpline for counselling drug addicts has 12 primary counsellors answering over 2,000 calls each month. “The entire focus of Nasha Mukt Bharat is on the youth and adolescents,” says Radhika Chakravarty, joint secretary in the ministry. “We are moving away from an institution-based approach like a government organisation or an NGO to a community-based one,” she says. India’s drug war will need all this and much more if it is to fight the growing scourge.