The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) is the Indian organization that sets and enforces drug policy. Its role is to prevent the importation of narcotics from other countries, prevent India from being used as transit point for narcotics bound for a third country, and stop the export of indigenous narcotics — India is a major grower of high-quality cannabis — and prescription drugs that are often diverted to the illicit market.  In recent years, with the world’s insatiable appetite for methamphetamine, India has become a major source of precursor chemicals like methylene used to make the powerful upper.  In recent years, foreign drug gangs have also set up meth labs to cook high quality ice for export.  The horse tranquilizer ketamine is also trafficked from India.

The creation of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) was a result of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substance Act, 1985, which authorized the federal government to constitute an authority to prevent and combat abuse of and traffic in narcotics. In March 1986, the NCB became part of the Department of Revenue (Ministry of Finance), which already had agencies such as the Central Bureau of Narcotics and Central Bureau of Excise and Customs under its wings — with the former regulating the cultivation of opium for medicinal purposes and the latter reining in illegal trade in narcotics. The CBN had the mandate to coordinate with these existing bodies and to widen the department’s scope to stamp out illegal production of narcotics as well as illegal trade, which may not always have been carried out through conventional trade points such as airports and border crossings.

Even after the formation of the NCB, for a long time, the authorities believed that India was merely a transit point for drugs, situated as it was between the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran) and the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand), the two main regions of illegal opium cultivation. According to a 2012 U.S. State Department report, India is a major transit point for heroin headed to Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and North America. In the early 2000s, though, a large percentage of the seized drugs were locally sourced, and around 2004, the administration of the NCB was handed over to the Ministry of Home Affairs. At present, NCB is headed by OPS Malik, an Indian Police Service officer, and has zonal offices, which, in turn, oversee intelligence cells.

The NCB gathers intelligence on unauthorized cultivation of opium and illegal manufacture of precursor chemicals and drugs. Based on the intelligence, its personnel conduct raids, seize chemicals, drugs or equipment and make arrests. Because only those who are found in possession of the drugs or precursor chemicals can be arrested, correct intelligence holds key. To locate areas in far-flung regions of the country where opium is being illegally cultivated, NCB officials also take the help of satellite images. Apart from the various drug-related laws, the NCB also adheres to the international conventions, such as that of the United Nations or the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

The agency is also very engaged in stopping legitimate pharmaceutical companies from exporting precursor chemicals to make methamphetamine. These chemicals include acetic anhydride (AA), ephedrine, and pseudoephedrine. These precursors often find their way to meth labs in both Mexico and Central America, where they are smuggled overland into the continental USA.

In recent years, indigenously grown heroin poppy has become a problem. India has to legal labs that produce medicinal morphine for domestic consumption. Farmers in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh supply the labs. The agency has to be careful that the forms that these farmers are required to complete are not falsified, and the heroin poppy isn’t diverted into the illicit market.  Heroin poppy is a notoriously finicky plant to grow.  Since it needs to be constantly watered, pruned and generally babied, it thrives in areas where there is little effective government, like in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s tribal areas and the Golden triangle. In those Naxal-affected areas of West Bengal, the investigative magazine Tehelka has reported, the lack of effective governance has allowed large swathes of land to be used to grow heroin poppy, which is often smuggled across the border to Bangladesh and processed into heroin there.

India is also a major grower of cannabis, especially in the northern states of Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. As a result, the area sees a significant number of drug tourists to score marijuana and hashish. In areas like Malana, which is renowned for Malana gold hash, foreign drug gangs have set up shop and export large quantities to Europe and North America.  Since many of these areas are remote and mountainous, the NCB hasn’t been terribly successful in stopping this trade, which also is the source of livelihood for area farmers.

Attached Bodies

Central Bureau of Narcotics (CBN)

The federal government issues licenses to farmers for cultivation of opium for medicinal purposes, then collects the produce and processes it in its factories and makes it available to pharmaceutical companies in India and for exports to companies abroad. It carries out these functions through the Central Bureau of Narcotics headed by a narcotics commissioner, which oversees opium farming in 22 districts across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Through the chief controller of factories, CBN also oversees two Government Opium & Alkaloid Factories: Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh and Neemuch in Madhya Pradesh.

The NCB provides assistance to state governments and its enforcement agencies to train its officers in clamping down on illegal manufacture and sale of drugs. The assistance is contingent upon the states setting up an apex committee to draw up a strategy and a five-year action plan and constituting an anti-narcotics task force with their police units. For the period from the fiscal year 2009-10 to the fiscal year 2013-14, $2.7 million has been set apart for this purpose. The NCB has a rewards program for officers of enforcement agencies who unearth drug rackets, seize drugs and make arrests. The rewards could go up to around $720 for a kilogram of 90 percent pure cocaine seized. But a former drug peddler claims that the rewards for officers are far greater in not declaring all the goods seized. The undeclared goods find a way back to the market and the officers and informers get handsome bribes.

An Unlikely Location

In early 2000s, when drugs were thought to be a menace only in the country’s northeast region bordering Myanmar and India merely a transit point for heroin from its neighbors, business in heroin was found to be thriving in Kolkata’s upmarket Salt Lake area. A man was arrested with more than 50 kilograms of heroin from opposite an inspector general of police’s (a top rank in the state police unit) residence and a drug lab was in the works in an apartment owned by a senior police officer. An NCB official had said then that the strategy of drug cartels was to operate out of places where the anti-narcotics agencies least expect to find them.

Guns, Drugs and Rebels (by Subir Bhaumik, Seminar)

‘Salt Lake is the Biggest Den of the Drug Mafia’ (Times of India)

Cop Turns into a Dealer

Chandigarh is the capital city of two north Indian states, Punjab and Haryana. Drug addiction has become common in Punjab, one of the wealthiest states in the country and a burgeoning market for Afghan-made heroin, which is smuggled in from Pakistan, just across the border. In January 2009, less than a month after Saji Mohan, an officer of the Indian Police Service, was transferred out of Chandigarh, where he was the NCB zonal director, he was arrested from a club in Mumbai with 12 kilograms of heroin. The chief of Maharashtra Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad, which made the arrest, said, under Mohan’s supervision, the NCB in Chandigarh had seized a large consignment of heroin, some of which he had set aside for himself and was then dealing in it. This took many by surprise as during his stint as the NCB zonal director in Chandigarh, Mohan was often in the news for busting drug-trafficking rackets and even exposing nexus of drug dealers with police officers.

NCB’s Ex-zonal Director Held in Drug Racket (Indian Express)

ATS Files Chargesheet against Saji Mohan (by Mayura Janwalkar, Daily News & Analysis)

Africans not Welcome in Delhi

Cocaine suppliers and heroine buyers in north India often happen to be Africans, especially the ones who come on the police’s radar and are arrested. The African community in Delhi, consisting of many well-intentioned students and businessmen, suffers because of these arrests that make news headlines. In 2006, when Rahul Mahajan, son of deceased Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former minister Pramod Mahajan, was hospitalized for an overdose of cocaine and later arrested, police traced the coke to a few Nigerians. Locals are unwilling to rent their houses to Africans, who contend that it is the racism of house owners that comes cloaked in the fear of drug traffickers.

Reality Check: Delhi Won't Let Home To Africa (by Jemima Rohekar, CNN-IBN)

Racism is in Your Face, Not under Your Skin (by Ashley Tellis, The Hindu)

Rahul Mahajan case: Three Nigerians Arrested in Delhi (Times of India)

Delhi’s Prescription Drug Scourge

Northwest Delhi’s Jahangirpuri neighborhood exemplifies India’s lax regulation of the prescription drug industry.  At various chemists throughout the area, addicts can score a kit composed of generic Valium and buprenorphine, which is supposed to be used like methadone, an antihistamine and a syringe with two clean replacement needles for just one U.S. dollar. By law, narcotics require a prescription. In practice, it is very easy to score potent prescription narcotics over-the-counter. For migrant workers in Delhi, who often live in slums and feel profoundly alienated, the pharmaceuticals provide an affordable escape from very difficult lives.  There has been no direct evidence that India’s burgeoning pharmaceutical industry are aware that their products are being funneled to drug addicts, but with really powerful and cheap pharmaceuticals so readily available, it would be hard for them not to deduce that much of their product is being diverted to the black market.

In India, Illicit Pharmaceuticals Ravage Communities and Lives (by Dave Besseling, The Atlantic)

Catch Up to Drug Trends

India’s drug addicts are not nearly as obsessed with opiates as the authorities trying to restrict their use. Christina Albertin, South Asia Representative for UN Office on Drugs and Crime, says the country’s drug scene has evolved ever since NDPS came into being in the mid-1980s and the last drug users’ survey was held in 2001. Synthetic drugs such as methamphetamines are now much more accessible and commonly used, and unless the NCB has its finger on the pulse of drug use, its law enforcement will yield little. The situation calls for a new drug users’ survey, tracking down transnational networks that maintain the supply — some of which have begun surreptitiously manufacturing in India, zeroing in on areas that illegally cultivate opium and, based on all these, up-to-date laws.

‘India’s Policy Response Has Not Caught Up with Drug Trends’ (by Rishi Majumder, Tehelka)

Meth Labs are Here (by Rishi Majumder, Tehelka)

Does the Death Penalty Deter Drug Dealing?

In 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which included Pakistani human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, former presidents of drug-affected Colombia and Mexico, Peruvian Nobel prize-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, released a report questioning the ill-conceived decades-long worldwide “war on drugs” that only served to create more dangerous mafias and more crime in the name of drugs. The commissioners even went on to suggest a legalized and regulated drug trade, enlightened by the experience of countries such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, which have had highly successful programs that focus on public health rather than criminalization of drug users. And while a law-enforcement-centric approach to fighting drugs is losing its appeal in some parts of the world, India has only become more aggressive even as its agencies such as the NCB succeed in only catching couriers who, without better employment opportunities and at the lowest rungs of the cartels, are themselves victims of the scourge.

Hang Drug Peddlers

A court in the north Indian city of Chandigarh sentenced two drug traffickers to death under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substance Act (NDPS). One was on parole from an earlier drug-trafficking case when he was caught delivering 10 kilograms of heroin to a citizen of Burundi. Another had already been awarded a 10-year prison sentence under the NDPS. The NCB officials and the prosecutors hailed the judgment as a breakthrough that would be a deterrent to others in the business.

Court Gives Death Penalty To Drug Dealer (NDTV)

NDPS Repeat Offender Gets Death Sentence (Indian Express)

Drug Peddler Gets Death Sentence (Hindustan Times)

Bombay High Court: Second NDPS Conviction Need Not Mean Death (by Rosy Sequeira, Dailynews News and Analysis)

No to Death Penalty

In 2011, the Bombay High Court had refused to hand death sentence to an accused upon his second conviction as provided for in the NDPS. The judges delivering the verdict said the act violates the Constitution’s stand on right to life. Then, Luke Samson, president, Indian Human Rights Network, a consortium of NGOs campaigning for human drug policies, had called it “a positive development, which signals that Courts have also started to recognize principles of harm reduction and human rights in relation to drugs.” A year later, then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee told the Parliament that his ministry will introduce a bill to remove the mandatory death sentence from the act.

Indian Court Overturns Mandatory Death Penalty for Drug Offences—First in the World to do so! (International Drug Policy Consortium)

Mandatory Death Penalty Provision May Be Dropped From NDPS Act (Times of India)

Say NO To Death for Drugs (by Anand Grover and Rick Lines, The Hindu)

KC Verma (2005-2008)

After three years in the NCB, KC Verma, a 1971-batch IPS officer, went on to become the secretary (security) in the cabinet secretariat. In the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, he became home minister P Chidambaram’s internal security advisor and then the director of the Research & Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency.