Atharva Shinde’s death shows cops have no control over the flow of narcotics in Mumbai

Few cases are being registered across city and often cops are found involved with the narcotics mafia; officials blame the dark web

Twenty-year-old Atharva Shinde’s murder has brought to fore, once again, the lack of control the Mumbai police and central agencies such as the Narcotics Control Bureau have on the supply chain of narcotics in the city.

“There is a steady flow of drugs into Mumbai. There are two categories of drug users in the city: those who cannot afford high-end party drugs rely on marijuana and hashish, while cocaine and Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) are the go-to drugs for the elite,” said a senior police officer, requesting anonymity.

Marijuana is the drug which has the maximum proliferation in the city, followed by hashish, which is mostly brought from Kashmir, said an Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) officer.

Shivdeep Lande, deputy commissioner of police, ANC, said, “Cocaine continues to be smuggled from Latin American countries, but passenger-profiling at Mumbai’s airport has been propped up to ensure that carriers of cocaine are arrested.”

“The major problem stems from the dark web where people order drugs, such as cocaine and LSD stamp, through courier services. This has been one of the major obstacles faced to crack down on these party drugs,” Lande added.

However, the responsibility of controlling drug flow in the city cannot be thrust entirely upon the ANC of the Mumbai crime branch, which has 5 units and 100 men spread across the city.

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), the state excise, and the Food and Drug Administration too are responsible to crack down on narcotics. In recent years, neither the state excise nor the FDA has cracked down on drugs. Moreover, the responsibility also lies with the 93 police stations across the city which hardly register cases of narcotics.

This has seen the drug cartels take advantage of the situation and spread their tentacles across the city. The rot has been such in the department that a famed IPS officer was on the payroll of Dawood Ibrahim aide Iqbal Mirchi, who used to control the narcotics trade in the city.

The trend continues with certain officers still being linked to the narcotic trade mafia. A recent arrest of a hashish supplier from Kashmir had revealed the involvement of at least four Mumbai police officers in the narcotics syndicate, said an ANC officer, privy to the investigations.

“When one looks at NCB or DRI’s performance, which has the mandate of monitoring both Maharashtra and Goa, there has hardly been any crackdown on the drug suppliers in recent years,” added the officer.

One of the major reasons that police stations do not register NDPS (The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) cases is because they are procedural in nature.

“There are some 56 to 57 standard operating procedures to follow while registering an NDPS case. This makes it tedious and cumbersome, so police stations look the other way,” said a senior IPS officer, requesting anonymity.