High-profile drug busts make for great headlines, but they won’t fix India’s growing drug problem

Late one summer evening in 1967, as the legendary rock musician Keith Richards basked in the gentle glow of LDS along with his guests—Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, art gallery owner Robert Fraser, and ‘Acid King’ David Schneiderman—a face pressed up against the windows of the living room. The intruder, the group thought, might be a particularly pesky groupie; “if we’re all really quiet they’ll go away,”  Faithful counselled. They didn’t: it was, in fact, the West Sussex Police. The raid led to three months prison time for the greatest stars of their time—a punishment applauded by a society in the throes of a media-driven moral panic, driven by the growth of counterculture. For some, the punishment seemed barbaric, far outweighing the crime: “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel” asked the London Times, in a leader authored by its editor, William Rees-Mogg? This weekend, as news breaks of the celebrity drug haul from a raid on a cruise ship off Mumbai—the latest in a string of similar arrests—Indians ought be reflecting on the same issue. To many, these arrests are the necessary deterrent against cultures which seem to endorse—even glamourise—drug use, corrupting youth across the country. From global experience, though, criminal justice experts have learned one key lesson: high-profile drug busts might make for great headlines, but they don’t do a lot to fix the global problem of addiction.

The first lesson is this: arrests have grown, but so has substance abuse.

In 2020, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, 59,906 cases were registered under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 33,246 of them for the possession of quantities lower than the threshold considered to be for personal use. Eighty-one percent of the 14,340 NDPS cases in which trials were completed saw convictions—well over twice as high as the rate for crimes like murder and rape. Legal expert Tripti Tandon has noted many NDPS accused face “harsh and disproportionate sentencing”. Yet, 10.05 million Indians are dependent on or problem users of opioids, including heroin, a government study concluded in 2019. Another 9.7 million on cannabis; 3.5 million on inhalants. That’s not even counting the 57 million people—overwhelmingly men—who abuse a legal psychotropic drug, alcohol. Less than one in four of these, the study estimates, will get any form of medical help for their disorders. Each of these numbers is a family plunged into crisis, even destroyed. Little systematic survey data exists in India, but United Nations Office on Drugs and Organised Crime estimates suggest 2.8 percent of the population use cannabis at least once a year. The use of opioids, at 2.1 percent and amphetamines, at 0.18 percent, similarly, is similar to regional trends. Figures for factory-manufactured methamphetamine, known among other things as Yaba, are harder to come by, but there’s growing concern of a surge entering India’s north east, from Myanmar. “I hope I’m wrong”, UNODOC south-east Asia chief Jeremy Douglas recently observed, but the drug trafficking situation in northeast India looks somewhat like it did in Bangladesh a few years ago, before methamphetamine really took off”. The second lesson from global experience is also counter-intuitive: aggressive seizures don’t do much to end the problem, either. Last month’s record-breaking haul of 3,000 kilograms of heroin—worth $60-90 million, on the basis of United Nations price estimates—is part of a global pattern. This year, enormous shipments have been caught by police worldwide: 23,200 kilos in Antwerp and Hamburg; 600 kilos off the coast of Sri Lanka; 1,452 kilos in Romania, 1,286 kilo in the Persian Gulf. Although the Narcotics Control Bureau registered a three-fold increase in volumes of seized narcotics in 2013-2018, it’s clearly done little to dent use. The expert Devendra Dutt has argued that the rising levels of seized drugs are simply a function of supply: 90 percent, on average, is sold to users, and 10 percent interdicted by authorities. Put simply, narcotics cartel know a percentage of their product will be interdicted. Given the enormous price difference between production and sale costs, it isn’t hard for them to ramp up production to compensate for losses to law enforcement. The NDPS Act, brought in by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, was in no small measure inspired by former United States president Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs. The campaign unleashed in the United States in the 1980s—involving everything from the use of military force against narcotics cartels to aggressive policing—led, by 2015, to a tripling of arrests for possession, to 1.3 million a year. A resident of the United States is now estimated to be arrested every 25 seconds for narcotics possession. Yet, there has been no positive impact on the narcotics landscape. Substance-misuse has grown, as have deaths from overdoses; the supply of synthetic drugs like fentanyl have overwhelmed entire communities. The war on drugs has also fuelled racial tensions: Black Americans are, for example, four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than Whites, and face longer prison sentences. Luigi Solvetti, in a report for the Swiss Federal Office for Heath, noted coercive regimes had no impact in retarding drug use in Italy either. Harsh sanctions introduced 1954, Solvetti noted, did not prevent the drug boom of the 1960s. Increased punishment against drug traffickers in 1975 did not retard trafficking; indeed, it grew. The final lesson is this: the world knows what does work, but political leaders and the public are reluctant to accept it, likely because of moral qualms. Faced with a similar crisis, Portugal conducted one of the most radical, and successful experiments in drug policy in 2001: The country decriminalised the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. Inside five years, levels of drug-related deaths had dropped radically, along with HIV infections due to needle use, as well as narcotics-linked street crime. Larger numbers of addicts, now no longer fearing the law, began seeking medical help. Perhaps most important, UNODOC has recorded, levels of drug use in Portugal are now well below the European average, and their adoption among the most-vulnerable cohort aged 15-24 has declined. There are multiple hypotheses for why this happened—but one plausible proposition is that legalisation reduced drug prices, reducing incentives for street pushers to promote their products. For generations, drugs were available in India, in various forms—their use tempered not by law, but by tradition and culture. The Atharva Veda recorded cannabis as one of five great plants which might “deliver us from woe”. Even today, its use in religious contexts is commonplace. The ladies of the Calcutta zenana, used cocaine to relieve dysmenorrhea, or menstrual cramps; working-class Delhi men to using it to delay orgasm. To do as Portugal has done, though, requires the moral courage to accept that prohibition serves only to provide perverse incentives to peddle drugs.