On 24 March, the Bengaluru City Police destroyed 4297.8 kg of narcotic drugs worth Rs 90.8 crore, which they had seized in about six months from October 2022 till that day, to mark “Drug Disposal Day”.
This includes 4,110 kg of ganja/marijuana and 62.7 kg of MDMA crystals besides 8,703 ecstasy tablets. It also served as a snapshot of the drug scene in Bengaluru. Hemp is the most widely used and confiscated narcotic, with even MDMA being the most popular synthetic drug on city streets.
the tipping point
The massive amount of narcotics seized by police in less than six months triggered the “War on Drugs” in 2019. While 286 cases were registered under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, 4,027 cases were registered in 2018. Booked in 2022.
The tipping point came in 2019, said a senior police officer. As part of the priority set by the Ministry of Home Affairs to go against narcotics across the country, the then Home Minister and now Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai then said that the “war against drugs” was his top priority.
Since then, even the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has been roped in to fight the narcotics menace and its alleged links with mafia and terrorist networks. However, during the pandemic, when citizens were dealing with many hardships, drug cases against popular film actors in Mumbai and Bengaluru grabbed a lot of media space, in what many called a “diversion tactic”.
The police are after the consumers
“Drug busting was not given the same attention as it was in the past, given that the central and state governments had made it their top priority. A lot of human and financial resources were invested in the problem. This was the first time such an intensive campaign was carried out in the city. We learned a lot during this operation, the momentum of which has been maintained till date,” said a senior police officer who was part of the city police in 2019.
From 286 cases in 2018, the police registered 768 drug cases in 2019, peaking during the pandemic to 4,555 cases in 2021, declining to 4,027 cases in 2022. However, despite a marked improvement in enforcement, the data hides much more than it shows.
Most of the cases registered under the NDPS Act, 1985 since 2019 are against consumers who are mostly let off with a fine of Rs 10,000 or in rare cases imprisonment of up to six months.
In 2017 and 2018, cases against consumers were less than 0.1% of the total number of cases – 2 against consumers and 352 against peddlers in 2017 and 2 against consumers and 284 against peddlers in 2018.
However, come 2019, this ratio changed – of the total 768 cases registered that year, 467 (over 60%) were against consumers and 301 against peddlers. In 2022, more than 85% of the cases registered were against peddlers.
The number of cases against peddlers increased by only 64% during 2017-22, while the number of cases against consumers increased from 2 to 3448.
tracking the peddler
A senior official of the team that led the crackdown in 2019 defended the changed strategy.
“More than willing to target and punish consumers, we decided to go after them to build a chain till the peddlers, and the strategy has clearly paid off. Even a consumer’s mobile phone provides us with many clues to track the entire network. The starting point of most of our drug seizures today is the consumer. Since consuming narcotics is also a crime, we book them too. But they are often let off by paying a fine,” said the official.
However, it may be recalled that Kannada film actors Ragini Dwivedi and Sanjana Galrani had to spend several months in jail after being arrested on charges of consumption, which came under fire from many. A senior official said the case against the two actors effectively disrupted the “drug-driven party ecosystem” in the city.
In the case, the city police also investigated the drug use by using new technology by examining hair roots. A senior official said, “This method has proved to be extremely effective as the test can not only confirm drug consumption in the previous year but also confirm which drug was consumed.”
challenges in battle
Police officials say consumers are not their focus, but they are the best way to reach peddlers and track their networks. Officials from the Anti-Narcotics Wing, Central Crime Branch, themselves admit that though they have been able to nab a few peddlers – mostly the last link on city streets – they have not had much success in tracking down and dismantling the source. Narcotics because most of these are outside the state and country.
For example, marijuana has recently been obtained from parts of Kerala, apart from Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. “We are coordinating with agencies, especially in the Visakhapatnam range, who are trying their best to stop the cultivation of ganja there. However, it has a challenging topography, and there are no other economic opportunities in the region, making it a formidable problem,” said a senior official.
darknet
More challenging has been the effort to track down and dismantle the networks that promote synthetic drugs. The official who led the charge in 2019 said, “This segment of the narcotics trade offers many challenges – the involvement of African nationals and the purchase of drugs from the darknet.”
In many cases, peddlers caught selling synthetic drugs such as MDMA crystals, Ecstasy tablets, LSD strips, or cocaine have bought them either directly from the darknet or from peddlers in Delhi, Mumbai, and Goa, who in turn sell them Will buy most. off the darknet, officials said. “As per rough estimates, more than 80% of the synthetic drugs we get through the darknet,” said an official.
The darknet offers anonymity and allows for lone wolf operators, creating a highly decentralized, diffuse network unconnected to each other. Payments are mostly made in cryptocurrencies, and the source of the narcotics is mostly anonymous and overseas. “We currently have no technology to monitor the darknet and stop trading there,” said an official well-versed in cybercrime. So the city police are focusing on intercepting these parcels when it jumps from the virtual to the real world – at the delivery stage.
“We started intercepting drug parcels at the airport and foreign post offices. We have chargesheeted five officials in foreign post offices for colluding with drug importers. We have increased our surveillance at these delivery points, where darknet orders turn into physical reality that can be intercepted. But we have no means of controlling the transactions that take place on the darknet. What we are catching could only be the tip of the iceberg of the quantum of narcotics being imported through the darknet, said a senior official. Given that the source is anonymous and darknet matters abroad, it remains unaffected by any of these movements in the country.
encrypted platform
Creating these statues has also increasingly become a challenge as peddlers are also adopting the technology in a big way. For example, in many cases, peddlers keep drugs in locations across the city and share the location of the drugs on encrypted messaging platforms sitting outside the state. Meanwhile, drugs crossing the Punjab border from the Af-Pak region also make their way into the city, which is beyond the purview of the city police to deal with.
The widespread involvement of African nationals in the synthetic drug trade presents its own challenges. “Most of those whom we apprehend are without proper documents and are overstaying. Since most of them are habitual criminals. The best way to curb his activities in the country is to deport him. However, as they have been booked under the NDPS Act, they cannot be deported until the cases are disposed of, which takes several years. In the meantime, they secure bail, come out and again return to smuggling drugs,” said a senior official.
strict laws
To control the menace of habitual peddlers, the city police have started booking habitual peddlers under the Prevention of Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1988, under which habitual offenders can be jailed for up to one year without bail. can be kept in custody and their property can be attached.
Given the challenges involved in tracking and dismantling these networks, including judicial issues, not enough human resources and time are invested in these aspects of the War on Drugs to provide long-term benefits.
“Given that Bengaluru is a global city, with a vibrant middle class with considerable disposable income and a pub culture, there will always be a market for narcotics in the city. If the supply source is not neutralized, drugs will continue to flood the city. It is a constant battle and we need to be ever vigilant. But we need to move on and graduate to try and take down the source of narcotics,” said a senior officer with considerable experience in fighting narcotics in the city.