HEALTH-INDIA: U.N. Study Links Drug Abuse to Unemployment

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 4 2001 (IPS) - A new United Nations-sponsored report reveals unemployment in India’s sprawling national capital as a major factor in the city’s emergence as an hub for international trafficking in heroin and other narcotics.

The report ‘Illegal Drug Market in Delhi’, a collaborative effort of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme and the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, is the first of its kind carried out in India.

The authors of the report, who included academics, officials from the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and doctors involved in de- addiction work, profiled the average drug dealer and trafficker in the city as an illiterate male in his mid-30s and a drug user himself.

One of the report’s principal investigators, Indrani Gupta, reader at the Health Policy Research Unit of the government”s Institute of Economic Growth, said those involved in the drug trade had little alternative means to improve their lives.

“The best deterrent of drug abuse and trafficking is economic development of all classes and categories,” Gupta told IPS.

Gupta and her colleagues said if the market for heroin in New Delhi has been stagnant over the last few years, it has been due to the economic boom experienced in the city.

They opined that the huge migration from neighbouring and distant states into New Delhi in search of economic opportunities created a high-growth economy, in which the costs of a drug habit would be very high.

In Gupta’s opinion, the fact that residents of the city”s squalid slums played an important role in retail trafficking and use of heroin indicated that socio-economic progress of deprived groups is key to eliminating the drug problem in the city.

Devendra Dutt, deputy chief of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) of the Union Finance Ministry, said there was a need for enforcement efforts to move from the wholesale trade to the retail business.

“Most retailers are in this trade to support their own drug use and some retailers reported that the profit margin is very little,” said Dutt, another investigator for the report.

The report says that in order to make more profits through either an increase in price or the induction of more people into drug use or trafficking, more people would have to be enticed into the habit.

This does not seem to be happening in New Delhi. “Right now the profits are coming only because of a steady captive market catering to people who find it hard to kick the habit,” Dutt said.

Extensive interviews carried out by the investigators in this city of 14 million people indicated a scattered local market and one which was not organised into cartels as in other parts of the world.

But retailers, of whom there are about a thousand in the city, reported that existing drug laws did not influence the local market in any way and that any increase in enforcement activity only resulted in temporary suspension of sales.

Sensational information turned up by the investigators included the fact of involvement of politicians in keeping the heroin trade going and the discovery of a single large retailer who sold up to 20 kilogrammes of heroin a month and had nearly 4,000 clients.

Heroin was freely available in the city and at least one outlet in the upmarket south district had patronage big enough to deter police from carrying out raids, the investigators said in their report.

“Drugs are sold on the sidewalk, off the roads and in slum areas in the vicinity of prosperous localities and business centres,” the report observed. It added that this was an “open secret which no one except the police deny.”

Although the study focused on the local market for heroin, it acknowledges that the city remained overwhelmingly a transit point for the international drug trade mainly because of its strategic location between the Golden Crescent countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle of Indochina.

In addition to the trafficking over the Indo-Pakistan and the Indo-Burma borders, heroin also finds its way from the neighbouring countries of Nepal and Sri Lanka to New Delhi for onward movement to Europe and North America.

India is itself a major producer of licit opium mostly grown in western Rajasthan, northern Uttar Pradesh and central Madhya Pradesh states “and there is considerable leakage of low grade heroin or “brown sugar” into illicit markets, the study notes.

In 1999, enforcement agencies seized a record 265 kilogrammes of heroin in New Delhi which, according to the report, is an indicator of the amount of the drug circulating in the city.

However, there is little to show what proportion of the heroin was intended for export and how much for local consumption.