Opium trade is popping off
LAST weekend, India’s Narcotics Control Bureau personnel mandated to target drug mafia boarded a cruise ship sailing to tourism destination Goa and picked up dozens of travellers for ostensibly consuming drugs. One of them, Aryan Khan, is the 23-year-old son of India’s most loved and successful film star, Shah Rukh Khan.
This raid, which was meant to name and shame the well-heeled alleged drug users, raised eyebrows about the importance it was getting over a gargantuan seizure of 3000kg of heroin made a fortnight ago at a private Mundra port on the west coast of India.
Originating from Afghanistan, the consignment of 3 000kg of refined heroin, with a street value of $2 billion (about R30.2bn), is the biggest catch ever by any drug enforcement agency anywhere in the world. This should have been a reason for the government to gloat, but it has been met with a bizarrely tepid response, making many political observers wonder at its implications.
Former finance minister P Chidambaram hinted at what this silence could mean when he said that such a big heroin consignment could not come to India without the involvement of people in high places. This is more so as India is a transit country, from where the opioid derivative goes to other destinations in the West and elsewhere.
Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the agency that seized the heroin, said: “High-quality heroin, a trademark of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, is being smuggled to Mozambique.
Editor of Hardnews in Dehli
From there, it goes to Johannesburg, Doha, and then to Indian cities, and is further destined to Australia and other countries. They (smugglers) are avoiding South Africans, and using other African nationals to avoid agencies in Johannesburg.
“While the Taliban is the source, the operation is done by African drug cartels. What is caught at the airports could be the tip of the iceberg. Seaports are the real concern.”
The government agency has no answers about why the heroin has to come to India from Africa to go to Europe and Australia. This bland reiteration that suggests that India is a “transit country” flies in the face of the mountain of evidence that is piling up, suggesting increased drug use in India.
Other investigating agencies discovered many bogus shell companies that got this consignment from Afghanistan – much before the Taliban took over Kabul. Even the 3 000kg container was destined to a city in southern India – thousands of kilometres away from the port where this opium derivative landed.
A lower court in the Gujarat city of Bhuj asked all the right questions from the law enforcement agency about the haul: “How will Mundra benefit if the drug lands at their port? Why did the heroin consignment land in Mundra, so far away from its southern destination?”
With the manner in which the nation’s attention is being diverted from this real haul to the one involving rich kids having a good time at a luxury liner, it is unlikely that the world will ever make an attempt to know who was really behind the shipment from Afghanistan. The reason is that Afghanistan’s soaring opium business has benefited from industrial obfuscation in which western media is complicit.
When the Us-led forces bombed their way to the occupation of this landlocked country, the total opium production used to be around 180 tons. In just two years of US occupation, opium production had unbelievably increased to 3200 tons. Before it was time for the US and its allies to leave Afghanistan, the production had reached 9 400 tons. Much of it is trying to get into destinations like India and elsewhere. If the world never raised its eyebrows over this, it has something to do with the enormous power that media wields on the thinking world.
Many of those areas that produced the highest quality opium were under UK control for more than a decade.
Later, the US troops took over this opium-producing state of Helmand.
A source embedded in Afghanistan’s Presidential Palace told this writer that unmarked flights carrying opium and its derivatives routinely took off from Kandahar airport.
Even the Iranian government made similar allegations about Nato flights ferrying opium out of Afghanistan.
If there is merit in these claims, then where did the US government spend $8bn to eradicate narcotics in the landlocked country? Detractors have called the US’S Afghanistan occupation a “Ponzi scheme” that allowed the military-industrial complex to make money. The drug trade played a major role in generating cash to pay off insurgent groups and warlords.
The Taliban is also accused of living off from drug proceeds, but the UN
Office on Drugs and Crime is a bit ambivalent about how much money Afghan religious fighters made from this business. What is repeated again and again is that the Taliban banned opium production after they came to power in 1996.
Indian police sources claim drug use in India has increased many times over, and it’s possible 3 000kg of heroin could find users here also. Earlier reports had suggested that “raw poppy” would come in containers to India, and would be refined in Indian mobile laboratories and shipped to Australia and Southeast Asia.
India is a licit producer of opium (for medical and scientific purposes), but UN agencies have alleged extensive leakage in the grey market. What needs to be seen is whether the Taliban takeover of Kabul impacts the drug trade in the region.