Narcotics, Indian Police and states
A rich haul of drugs from a government official’s family in Lucknow has considerably surprised the Narcotics Control Bureau officials last week. The consignments had been coming from overseas not through the drug peddlers jumping hoops over airport security, but as regular packages ordered through courier services by someone without any previous criminal records. The payment method was even more surprising, it was bitcoins.?
“The entire method is so simple yet elaborate, it touched none of our checkpoints”, said a serving police officer who deals with narcotics related cases.?
The level of risks are rising in India’s non border states. The United States Treasury run Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), much in the news now, has recently begun to crack down on Chinese opioids being smuggled into USA. Some of those lines are also understood to be seeping into India.?
It is this level of sophistication which worries the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), the agency under the ministry of home affairs whose job is to stamp down trade in cannabis and poppy derivatives across India. It needs money to do so, which is not available. Without the money the states are reluctant to spend. It is not that the states are starved of their own funds but narcotics seizure is a low priority. The emphasis is on seizure of illicit cannabis and poppy cultivation by farmers and destroying those. But new channels are emerging fast bypassing these routes.?
Yet while the Uttar Pradesh police budget for FY21 is Rs 27287 crore there is almost no allocation for tracking narcotics. The centre’s scheme to finance narcotics control among all states for three years is all of Rs 21 crore. In the budget estimate for FY21, the sum allocated is a “princely” Rs 5 crore to be spent among the 36 states and union territories of India.?
Each state is supposed to set up an Anti-Narcotics Task Force to be headed by an Inspector General (joint secretary) level officer which shall have a five year plan to combat narcotics issues. Most states are nowhere near to setting up those. It is only states like Punjab, one of the most affected state that has set it up.?Maharashtra too has an anti-narcotics force. It was set up in 2005. Between then and 2016, however, the force met only twice. It has possibly got a bit more active since then. The centre first came up with the plan for such state level forces in 2004. The NCB status report on the measures notes the Task Forces are still being set up.
“The reasons are easy to guess”, says Rashmi Verma, former IAS officer, who did a long stint as additional secretary, department of revenue in the finance ministry. The home ministry is in charge of weeding out illicit cultivation of cannabis and poppy, while the finance ministry runs the licit cultivation of the same. “Narcotics seizures are not top priority unless those are accompanied by other crimes”, she said. So the states are usually reluctant to spare police forces to patrol such hauls. ?
The NCB acknowledges the impact of this light policing. “According to the latest assessments, there are approximately 4 million drug addicts in India. The actual figure may be still higher”. ( italics mine) It is quite possible. The ministry of social justice and empowerment puts the number of drug addicts (problem users) at more than thrice the number at 15 million. The NCB data is from FY18, the social justice ministry data from FY19, so they are quite comparable.?
The centre too has been fairly lackadaisical about the risks. For instance the report by the social justice ministry comes fifteen years after the last report to track drug usage in India. That report in 2004 inexplicably didn’t cover the female population of India and so its numbers are not comparable with the latest one.?
The risks of light policing are, however, severe. In August this year, FinCEN announced coordinated actions to bring additional financial pressure upon those who manufacture, sell, or distribute synthetic opioids or their precursor chemicals. Under USA’s Foreign?Narcotics?Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act).?The US Attorney’s office has tracked conspiracies to manufacture and ship drugs like “fentanyl analogues, cathinones, and cannabinoids to at least 37 US states and 25 countries”. In the court proceedings the Attorney’ office has argued about the presence of supply chain companies through which fentanyl products enter the United States and move domestically to their end users.?The most common distribution medium is via the U.S. Postal Service.?The drug imports to the recent Lucknow seizures could be mimicking such routes.The police departments are yet to catch up. Drugs seized by them pile up for years. A government release said in January this year the customs department “carried out an all India destruction of huge quantity of seized/confiscated narcotics and psychotropic drugs and substances…This is the first time ever that narcotics & psychotropic drugs and substances have been simultaneously destroyed in an all India operation”.?
The seizures are also an evidence of how in the absence of strong support by the states, it is the central government agencies, of NCB, Central Economic Intelligence Bureau and Directorate of Revenue Intelligence that mostly shoulder the responsibility.?For example in September a haul of 2,800 kg of cannabis was made in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar by NCB.?
The reasons states are anaemic about their involvement is the size of the corpus and the difficult requirements to get the money. The rules say the states have to prove they lack the infrastructure to catch the criminals, provide a 3 year action plan which shall provide the template for an assessment of the gravity of the problem by a central government committee. Too much work for a problem that does seem quite low down in order of importance. Yet the data from the social justice ministry shows the risks are not that low.?
Verma says the extent of licit cultivation has come down in states like Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, where the government runs its two drug processing factories at Neemuch and Ghazipur. “There is always the risk of understating of production by the farmers who hold the patta for cultivation”. The government insists that a threshold level of production or Minimum Qualifying Yield should be produced by the cultivators to get the patta next year. But as the price difference between the receipts from the legal sale and the illegal sale was always high, the farmers would try to duck, she said. Despite the shortfall the next year they would lobby hard to get the contract again. In 2020 for instance the farmers have claimed since there has been disruptions due to Covid-19 the standards should be dropped.?
?One of the alternatives some states have considered is legalising some of the drug usage. As a report by Neha Singhal and Naved Ahmed for Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy points out, Sikkim with one of the highest incidence of drug abuse has flirted with legalising prescription drug abuse. It enacted the Sikkim Anti-Drugs Act, 2006 (SADA) that did not jail offenders but imposed a fine of Rs. 10,000. “However, in 2011 SADA was amended to provide for stricter punishments and the fine for illicit drug use was increased from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 50,000”. In response to objections by civil society, the state has again softened SADA to differentiate between drug paddlers and users, and emphasised rehabilitation. Singhal and Ahmed conclude that the softer approach has paid off with a sharp drop in the number of undertrials for such drug offences after the 2018 amendment.
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But this is not the norm. Other states like Punjab and even the Supreme Court has now moved to the other extreme. The Court has held that mere evidence of possession of drugs shall invite punishment under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act of 1985 irrespective of the quantity. Such strictness could be counterproductive as new area come under the spell of these crops. In the Western Ghats districts of Karnataka farmers have begun diversifying big time to plant cannabis. A media report describes it as a “a win-win” deal. The farmers cover their losses while the expanding market for the drugs encourages new crime syndicates to offer protection to them.
About 2.8% of Indians aged 10-75 years (3.1 crore individuals) are current users of any cannabis product
States with higher-than-national prevalence of cannabis use are Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Sikkim, Chhattisgarh and Delhi.?
About 2.1% of Indians aged 10-75 years (2.26 crore individuals) are current users of any opoid product
States with higher than national prevalence of opoid use are Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat
Approximately 12.6 lakh individuals) report using hallucinogens of which about 3.4 lakh individuals need help
Opoid: (1) Opium (including doda/phukki/poppy husk); (2) Heroin (including brown sugar/smack) and (3) Pharmaceutical opioids
Cannabis: (1) Bhang (2) Ganja and Charas
Top five states where people need help for cannabis usage (in lakh)
Top five states where people need help for opoid usage ( in lakh)
NCB data of 2018: 49,450 cases were registered for drugs seizure in which 60,156 persons (including foreigners) were arrested
( a version of this article appeared in Business Standard https://mybs.in/2YQMqUd September 2020. It puts a lot of perspective to the current noise around drug haul, even though I wrote it last year )
Chief Mentor UPSC at Testbook
3 年Hi subhmoy I have been in charge of Govt Opium & Alkaloid factories at Ghazipur and Neemuch in the capacity of Cheif Controller of Govt opium & alkaloid Factories from 2018-2021 and had recommended to the Narcotic Control division in Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance, Concentrate of Poppy Straw Technology(CPS) which does not involve the process of lancing of the opium poppy to extract resin which converts into raw opium which is vulnerable to under-reporting and diversion.In fact Ghazipur factory had a case of theft of opium with the apparent connivance of CISF official who is still serving a jail sentence after removal from service. The poppy flower is cut with 8 inches stem and the whole thing is processed for extraction of alkaloids. So no opium stage and consequently no scope for diversion. Plus no issues of purity and concentration % of morphine and therefore no possibility of fudging the test reports of opium samples submitted by the farmers. But is anyone serious about it? I have lost track of further progress in the matter but it is worth following up for a senior pressman like you. ??
Resident Director Tata Steel Global Procurement Pte. Ltd .
3 年Insightful !