Kamasutra can get you high too

Copies of the book being sent abroad through courier companies with heroin packets hidden inside have been seized.

The Kamasutra has many uses but even Vatsyayana would not have guessed this one. Apparently, the treatise on lovemaking is quite popular with smugglers sending drugs out of India. Since January, the Delhi Zonal Unit of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has seized 17 coffee-table books, many of them the Kamasutra, which were being sent abroad through courier companies. Carefully concealed in them were small packets of heroin. "This has become a popular method to smuggle out heroin," says an NCB officer. "The thick cardboard (hardbound) covers are scraped and the packets with heroin hidden inside." Apart from the Kamasutra, coffee-table books on Indian mythology, gods and goddesses are also common. "This is probably because such books are popular in the West, and sending them does not arouse suspicion," says the officer. The senders' addresses on the parcels are, as a rule, fictitious. "We suspect Nigerians to be behind the racket," says the official. "But it's always young Indian girls — the girlfriends of Nigerian smugglers — who book the parcel at the courier companies."

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