Subject: Drug Trafficking

Why in the News

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has flagged off the first of four “Nasha Mukt Punjab” yatras, a campaign that will cover nearly 4,000 km before culminating at Jalandhar on 30 September. The party has said it will contest all 117 seats in Punjab on its own, and the Union Home Minister is expected to address the closing rally. The campaign follows the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government’s “Yudh Nasheyan Viruddh” drive, launched in March 2025. That drive has produced arrests and seizure figures in abundance. It has not produced any visible slowdown in the flow of contraband. The tension is that a problem which has outlived a dozen crackdowns and three governments is being contested as an electoral idiom rather than a policy question, so the state keeps publishing enforcement output while the money, the supply routes and the treatment capacity behind the trade stay untouched.

Why has the drug question returned to the centre of Punjab’s politics?

1. A recurring electoral peg: The drug question returns to the centre of the state’s politics before successive elections, and it has returned again as the next Assembly election approaches.
2. The BJP’s framing: The yatras run under the slogan “Bhajpa Da Naara, Nasha Mukauna Saara”, which states the objective of ending drug use without naming a measure that would deliver it.
3. The Congress response: The party’s Punjab in charge led a protest at Chandigarh over the death of a labourer who had publicly questioned the state Finance Minister about the availability of drugs.
4. The Akali Dal position: Leaders of the Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) made drugs the centrepiece of their campaign at the Rakhar Puniya rally and promised a white paper on the scourge.
5. The common shape of all three: Each response is a yatra, a protest or a promised document, and none of them carries a stated measure on financing, supply routes or treatment capacity.

Why has the border explanation stopped explaining the trade?

1. Position on the supply route: Punjab sits at the edge of the Golden Crescent and shares a border of roughly 550 km with Pakistan, which is the reason most often cited for the scale of the problem.
2. Drone delivery: Drones now ferry consignments across the line, which removes the physical crossing that a fenced and patrolled border is designed to intercept.
3. Relay points in other States: Other States have become relay points in the chain, so a consignment no longer has to reach Punjab directly from the border at all.
4. Diverted pharmaceutical drugs: Pharmaceutical drugs are cheaper, more accessible and harder to trace, and they have become an important part of the trade.
5. The consequence for strategy: A trade that has outgrown the border cannot be contained by a response built around the border.

Why have arrests and seizures not slowed supply?

1. Output without outcome: The campaign launched in March 2025 has generated arrests and seizure figures in abundance with no corresponding fall in the contraband reaching users.
2. Enforcement reaches the wrong end of the chain: Arrests fall on carriers and users at the retail end, while those who finance and supply the trade are not prosecuted.
3. The money trail is unexamined: A serious response has to trace the money moving through the trade, and no campaign so far has produced that examination.
4. Institutional failures are unnamed: The trade survives because of institutional failures that allow it to operate, and no crackdown has identified or acted on them.
5. The cost the seizure count does not record: Families are destroyed and many young Punjabis leave the state in search of a future abroad, which is the outcome no enforcement statistic captures.

What must a policy response do that a campaign cannot?

1. Dismantle the networks: The state has to dismantle the networks controlling the trade rather than only intercept the consignments those networks move.
2. Prosecute financiers and suppliers: Prosecution has to reach those who finance and supply the trade, because that is where the incentive to continue actually sits.
3. Build treatment capacity: Accessible treatment and sustained rehabilitation are required for those caught in addiction, and both are capacity questions rather than campaign questions.
4. Provide an alternative occupation: Young people need opportunities to rebuild their lives, since recovery without an occupation returns a person to the same market.
5. The family cannot substitute for the state: Families matter in prevention and recovery, and that role does not allow the state to abdicate its own responsibility.

Challenges to Punjab’s anti drug policy

1. Prosecution stops at the carrier: Enforcement records the quantity seized rather than the ownership of the consignment, so the chain above the carrier survives every recovery. Eg. The Special Task Force report on Punjab’s drug trade, submitted to the Punjab and Haryana High Court in a sealed cover in 2018, was never made public.
   The Fix: Require every commercial quantity case to carry a financial investigation report naming the funder before the chargesheet is filed.
2. Diverted pharmaceutical supply is a licensing failure: Prescription opioids leave the legal chain at the chemist and the manufacturer, which is a regulatory lapse that no border deployment can reach. Eg. Tramadol was brought under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 by notification in 2018 after it displaced heroin in parts of the state.
   The Fix: Link every Schedule H1 opioid sale to a prescription number in a State drug database and audit the outlier chemists monthly.
3. Treatment is counted in registrations, not in completions: Outpatient opioid assisted treatment centres report enrolment while relapse after discontinuation goes untracked, so the system cannot say what treatment achieved. Eg. Punjab runs Outpatient Opioid Assisted Treatment centres across its districts alongside government de addiction centres.
   The Fix: Publish a retention at six months figure for each centre, so capacity is measured by completed treatment rather than by registrations.
4. Interdiction lags the delivery method: A small drone crosses in minutes and its payload is recovered only after it has landed, so the seizure confirms the delivery rather than preventing it. Eg. The Border Security Force has recovered drones and dropped consignments along the Punjab frontier in rising numbers each year since 2020.
   The Fix: Fund a counter drone detection grid along the Punjab frontier and tie each recovery to the ground receiver traced from it.

Conclusion

Punjab has heard the promise of a drug free state from three governments and is hearing it again from four parties. The state does not lack a diagnosis of the trade; it lacks a policy that outlasts the campaign that announced it. What remains unresolved is that enforcement produces a number a government can publish within weeks, while financial investigation, prosecution of financiers and treatment capacity produce results only across a full term. The 2027 Assembly election is where that record gets tested, and the test is for Punjab’s political class as a whole rather than for one party in office.

Back2Basics: Golden Crescent

1. What it is: The Golden Crescent is the illicit opium producing region of South West Asia, covering Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.
2. Why it reaches India: Afghanistan has historically been the largest single source of the region’s opium, and the output moves outward through Pakistani and Iranian routes.
3. The other producing region: The Golden Triangle, covering Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, is the second major illicit opium region and feeds India’s eastern land routes.
4. India’s position between them: India lies between the two regions, which is the basis for its classification as a transit country as well as a consuming one.

Matching Previous Year Question

“India’s proximity to two of the world’s biggest illicit opium-growing states has enhanced her internal security concerns. Explain the linkages between drug trafficking and other illicit activities such as gunrunning, money laundering and human trafficking. What counter-measures should be taken to prevent the same?”

Why in the News

More than 10 lakh people have registered at Punjab’s government de addiction clinics since the State opened them, and that figure counts only those who gave their names. What changed in Punjab is the chemistry of the supply rather than its presence, since opium and poppy husk were consumed within social boundaries for generations. Chitta, the local name for smoked or injected synthetic heroin, reaches the brain in seconds. The Outpatient Opioid Assisted Treatment (OOAT) programme can report how many crore tablets it dispensed last year and cannot report how many people recovered. The tension is between policing and treatment. Peddlers have been arrested under every government without a single trafficking network being broken, and the treatment system that would cut demand was built and then left unfunded.

What is the Outpatient Opioid Assisted Treatment programme?

1. What it does: It delivers opioid substitution treatment on an outpatient basis, so a dependent person receives a prescribed medicine at a clinic and returns home rather than occupying a bed.
2. Why substitution is used: A long acting oral opioid occupies the same brain receptor as heroin without the rapid rise that drives craving. That allows a person to function while the dependence is managed.
3. How it is delivered: The programme runs through government OOAT clinics across Punjab, with dispensing recorded centrally.
4. What it does not do by itself: Substitution manages dependence. It does not supply the counselling, follow up and employment that decide whether a person stays recovered.

Why has the chemistry of the supply changed the nature of the problem?

1. The same receptor, a different speed: Opium and heroin act on the same brain receptor. The difference between them is the speed at which each reaches it.
2. Why the rate of rise matters: Opium eaten is absorbed over hours, so the body can adjust to it. Heroin smoked or injected arrives in seconds, and it is that rate of rise that builds craving.
3. What sustained use does: When a stronger drug floods those receptors every day, the brain stops producing its own opioids. Within months the user is chasing an ordinary baseline rather than a high.
4. Why willpower is the wrong frame: Withdrawal is the loss of the ability to feel ordinary comfort. It is not a matter of discomfort or resolve.
5. What this changed in Punjab: Poppy husk was sold at the village shop and opium was taken at weddings, funerals and harvests, within recognised limits. The shift to fast acting synthetic opioids removed those limits with no change in the population’s morals.

What does the registration figure show, and what does it miss?

1. The undercount: The register counts only those who gave their names, so the dependent population is larger than the recorded number.
2. What a registration is not: A registration records an entry into treatment. It records nothing about completion, relapse or recovery.
3. The household scale: Each registration stands for a family waiting on an outcome, which makes this a demand side problem of a size no enforcement drive can absorb.
4. Why the number is the starting point: A dependent population of this size sets the staffing, dispensing and follow up load the system has to be built for.

Why can interdiction alone not close the supply?

1. The arithmetic of potency: Synthetic opioids are potent enough that a year’s worth can cross the border in a drone the size of a tiffin box, so seizure volumes cannot keep pace with supply.
2. Arrests without networks: Every government of every colour has arrested peddlers. Not one has dismantled a trafficking network.
3. Where enforcement would have to move: Effective control needs technology on the fence, detection grids, counter drone systems and forensics that trace a consignment backwards to its source.
4. The political element: Prosecution has to reach the people who protect the trade, rather than stopping at the boys who consume it.

What has gone wrong with treatment delivery?

1. Built and then starved: The OOAT programme was created with a working frame and then left without the money to run it.
2. Counting the wrong thing: The State can report the tablets dispensed. It cannot report the people recovered.
3. Diversion priced into the system: A tablet costing thirty rupees at the clinic sells for three hundred rupees outside it. That price gap is a direct measure of how little supervision is being paid for.
4. The empty posts: Punjab has a very small number of psychiatrists, and counsellors and hospital beds are similarly short, so the clinical side of the programme is understaffed.
5. The budget comparison: The entire de addiction budget is a rounding error against the State’s power subsidy bill.
6. Follow up and work: Relapse occurs around 18 months after the last dose, so follow up has to run long past discharge. A recovered person with nothing to do on a weekday afternoon is not recovered.

Challenges to Punjab’s drug de addiction response

1. Treatment capacity is concentrated in dispensing: Clinics can hand out medicine at scale without the psychiatric and counselling staff that make substitution therapy work. Eg. The National Mental Health Survey, 2015 to 2016 recorded a treatment gap above 80 percent for alcohol use disorders in India, driven by the shortage of trained personnel.
   The Fix: Fund and fill sanctioned psychiatrist and counsellor posts at OOAT clinics before dispensing capacity is expanded further.
2. Diversion of substitution medicine: Unsupervised take home dosing allows prescribed opioids to reach the illicit market, so the treatment supply becomes a source of supply. Eg. Buprenorphine formulations dispensed under opioid substitution programmes have been recovered from illicit markets in several States.
   The Fix: Require directly observed dosing at the clinic through the initial phase, and link take home doses to verified follow up attendance.
3. Border technology lags the smuggling method: Fencing and patrolling were designed against people and vehicles, not against small payload aerial delivery. Eg. The Border Security Force recovers drones along the Punjab frontier with Pakistan every year, and annual recoveries have risen rather than fallen.
   The Fix: Deploy a continuous counter drone detection and jamming grid along the Punjab border sector, in place of sighting and pursuit.
4. Prosecution stops at the consumer end: Cases cluster at small quantity possession, so the financing layer above the peddler is rarely reached. Eg. Case loads under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 are dominated by small quantity matters rather than by commercial quantity trafficking.
   The Fix: Route every commercial quantity seizure to a parallel financial investigation, so the trafficking case and the asset case are run together.
5. Recovery has no employment endpoint: A person completing treatment returns to the same absence of work that preceded the dependence, so relapse is structurally invited. Eg. Punjab’s high rate of youth emigration reflects the shortage of local work that treatment programmes discharge people back into.
   The Fix: Attach a guaranteed skilling and placement slot to discharge from an OOAT clinic, tracked through the period in which relapse occurs.

Conclusion

Punjab has organised its response around arrest and abstinence, and neither instrument matches what the problem actually is. Dependence on fast acting opioids is a treatable clinical condition sitting on a criminal supply chain, and the clinical side has been funded as an afterthought. A state that can count tablets and cannot count recoveries has not yet settled what it is trying to achieve. The thing to watch is whether the next State Budget moves the de addiction allocation to a level comparable with the State’s other standing commitments, and whether recovery, rather than dispensing, becomes the reported statistic.

Government Initiatives for drug demand reduction

1. Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan: Launched in 2020 by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, it runs awareness, community outreach and treatment linkage in the districts identified as most affected.
2. National Action Plan for Drug Demand Reduction: The central scheme funds State run de addiction and rehabilitation centres, counselling services, community peer networks and awareness programmes.
3. MANAS helpline: The Narcotics Control Bureau operates a national toll free helpline for reporting drug trafficking and for seeking counselling and rehabilitation support.
4. National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre: Based at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, it conducts national surveys of substance use and trains treatment personnel for State programmes.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2018, GS3, 15] India’s proximity to two of the world’s biggest illicit opium-growing states has enhanced her internal security concerns. Explain the linkages between drug trafficking and other illicit activities such as gunrunning, money laundering and human trafficking. What counter-measures should be taken to prevent the same?”