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Crime And Politics Of Opium Trade
Pubdate: Fri, 15 Jul 2005
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2005 San Jose Mercury News
Contact: http://www.mercurynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Paul Watson, LA Times
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?232 (Chronic Pain)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
CRIME AND POLITICS OF OPIUM TRADE
KOLKATA, India - Cancer was slowly killing an old man in his
fourth-floor apartment, and as the disease spread from organ to bone,
sharp pains stabbed at his very core.
A clear, oblong patch was stuck to Shyam Sundar Nevatia's chest, just
above his weakening heart, gradually releasing a 25-milligram dose of
opium-based narcotic over three days. The medication was no match for
the relentless pain as death drew near.
Nevatia's doctor had prescribed more powerful morphine pills, but the
74-year-old businessman's family checked at hospitals and pharmacies,
and even on the black market, without finding any.
India is the world's largest producer of legal opium, the raw
material for codeine, morphine and other painkillers. But corruption
and red tape have left thousands of Indians such as Nevatia to die in agony.
And strict licensing hasn't stopped drug gangs from diverting opium
meant for medicines to smuggling routes shared by heroin and morphine
traffickers, gun-runners and Islamist militants, police say.
"Organized crime and politics join together in this to make life
miserable," said A. Shankar Rao, zonal director of the Narcotics
Control Bureau, a national police unit.
Mala Srivastava, the federal official who oversees the licensing
system, denied that it had serious flaws.
"Whatever little diversion there is is internal," she said. "We have
never heard of Indian opium, or Indian heroin, traveling abroad."
But the U.S. State Department's annual report on narcotics-control
strategy calls India "a modest but growing producer of heroin for the
international market."
In an effort to keep opium out of criminal hands, India's federal and
state governments license every step of the process, from growing
poppies to stocking and transporting the painkilling drugs they produce.
But officials who issue the permits often don't answer the phone, are
away from their desks or let applications languish for weeks, doctors
and pharmacists complain. Sometimes hospitals run out of morphine
while waiting for permit applications to work their way through the
bureaucratic labyrinth.
"We have so many patients suffering," said Dr. Dwarkadas K. Baheti, a
pain-management specialist at Bombay Hospital, in India's largest
city, Mumbai. "After two or three months, suddenly we have no
morphine left, and for the next month, none is available."
The problems India faces have ramifications beyond the pain of its
people. Afghanistan, which has the world's largest supply of illegal
opium, is considering whether to license production for painkilling
medicine, to channel opium away from the heroin market.
Experts with the Senlis Council, a French drug-policy advisory group,
are conducting a feasibility study in Afghanistan on the issue.
"Initial research reveals a serious lack of morphine and other
opiates on the global medical market," the agency said when the study
was announced in March. "Because of its present situation,
Afghanistan could play an important role in the production of
essential medicines for the world."
The French study's results are to be released in September at an
international drug conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Rao said
the Afghan government should learn from India's mistakes and do all
it can to eradicate opium farming.
The United States imports 80 percent of its opium for pharmaceutical
companies from India and Turkey, a policy up for review next year.
U.S. drug companies processed 357 tons of opium, almost two-thirds of
global consumption, in 2003, according to the most recent figures
available from the International Narcotics Control Board.
Indians who have money often turn to an expensive opium-based
medicine imported from the United States because it is easier to get
than cheap, locally produced morphine. Nevatia's family paid a
Kolkata pharmacist about $10 for each Johnson & Johnson Durogesic
patch, more than five times the cost of a three-day supply of opium tablets.
But licensing hasn't stopped traffickers, aided by corrupt officials,
from getting opium and other drugs, Rao said.
"With the support of local police and politicians, they convert this
opium into 'smack,' " slang for heroin, said Vinod Kumar Shahi, a
lawyer in Lucknow, capital of northern India's Uttar Pradesh state.
Shahi has learned a lot about the drug trade in 20 years of defending
many of the region's top gangsters.
By helping traffickers, police can earn 50 times their official
monthly salary of about $230, Shahi said. So they pay large bribes to
superiors to be posted at police stations in the opium belt of
northern India, he said.
Tons of tarlike opium gum are skimmed off India's legal supply each
year and sent to ad hoc chemists. With a plastic tub, a cup and
chemicals easily found on the black market, they make the low-grade
heroin base known as "brown sugar" on the street. There, illegal
morphine is worth as much as 25 times what the government pays for
it, Rao said.
India is a transit country for almost-pure Afghan heroin, which is
smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan, often in inflated tire tubes
that are floated across rivers along the border. The high-grade
heroin produced from Afghan opium accounts for about 87 percent of
the world supply, according to the United Nations. Indian drugs also
go south to Sri Lanka, where guerrillas with the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam use money from heroin trafficking to fund their war for
independence.
Meanwhile, those who need the painkilling peace that opium-based
drugs brings go without.
"The pain is spreading," Shyam Sundar Nevatia said from his bed, in a
raspy whisper, in May. "It's all over the body. Sometimes the pain
moves slowly, and sometimes it's intense."
Before he retired, Nevatia ran his own steel-trading company, and set
up a charitable foundation to provide medicine to the poor in the
name of his late wife, who died of cancer.
On May 21, he died in his bedroom.
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