Last year, when officials of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) ran a routine check of the parcels routed through the Foreign Post Office (FPO), they were in for a surprise. A little over a kilogram of high-quality cocaine was being sent to the United Kingdom. The discovery threw up several alarming possibilities for the officials. India, sandwiched between the world's two major poppy-growing centres-the Golden Crescent in the west and the Golden Triangle in the east-had always been a major transit point for drugs such as heroin. But a far more expensive drug such as cocaine was simply not on the radar. The discovery of the cocaine parcel at the FPO was the first indication that India is now emerging as a possible transit route for cocaine to hoodwink enforcement agencies concentrating so far on the Africa route.
NCB officials say the world over whenever a country becomes the transit point, local availability of the drug goes up significantly. This perhaps explains why cocaine is more easily available in Indian cities than it was a few years ago.
Cocaine, derived from the leaves of the coca plant, is produced in Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. It is transported by sea or air to western and eastern Africa and the US. From Africa, couriers branch out to Asia and Europe. So far, say NCB officials, east and west Africans had proved to be the usual suspects as couriers for the expensive cocaine, fetching as high as Rs 5,000 per gram. A United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report on India stated that "traffickers from outside India have also established themselves in the country and have developed a network of local suppliers and international couriers." It noted that the most common are the Nigerian groups.
NCB officials closely monitoring the cocaine drug trail have found that Mumbai airport and the seafront in Goa have been the usual entry points for the drug. The modus operandi employed by the couriers is simple. Cocaine is packed in capsules of 10 grams each. This is then put inside condoms, which are then tightly wrapped in sellotape to prevent them from bursting due to the body's internal heat. For, the couriers ingest the packets. Once in India, a few laxatives helps the courier eject the capsules. After the courier clears customs at airports and sea ports, the drug is taken over land to Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore and other metros. In fact, in February this year, the NCB nabbed a Kenyan national carrying 400 grams of cocaine marked for a Delhi-based supplier using this very method. Again in July, the NCB homed in on another African national carrying cocaine for peddlers based in North India.
The UNODC's world drug report 2005 notes a rise in the quantity of cocaine that has been seized by Indian officials in the past five years. Till 2000, Indian agencies had caught less than a kilogram of cocaine a year. But since 2001 seizures have been above two kilograms. At the going rate of Rs 5,000 per gram, the seizures translate into a neat Rs 1 crore every year. Officials dealing with the control of narcotics the world over have a thumb rule: this says what has been seized is usually just 10 per cent of what is actually slipping in unnoticed. If that is true, the amount of cocaine passing through India could be of alarming proportions.
What worries NCB officials is that consumption of high-end drugs such as cocaine and ecstacy can prove fatal. Cocaine abuse could lead to full blown paranoia, heart attacks, strokes and respiratory failure. But it seems with lounge bars and pubs emerging as the retail outlets for the drug, its abuse will only increase in the days to come.