The Hindu : New Delhi News : NCB to check dubious portals

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 22, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

NCB to check dubious portals

Devesh K. Pandey

Price difference cited as reason for illegal export

NEW DELHI: In the wake of the largest ever seizure of narcotics and psychotropic drugs from Indian nationals who were running a massive racket in illegal export of such pharmaceutical items through deals struck on Internet websites, the Delhi zonal unit of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) is now planning to set up a separate unit to monitor dubious portals to put a curb on such activities in future.

During the operation conducted in coordination with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of the United States government, the NCB seized over 40 lakh tablets of about 15 varieties of controlled pharmaceutical items including vicodin, lorazepam, diazepam, alprazolam, and paracetamol-with-coleine (PWC). The quantity of seizure this time was much higher than the one made by the Chennai zone of NCB last year, in which the accused were employing similar modus operandi.

A senior NCB official said a major reason for such mass scale illegal export of pharmaceutical drugs was the big difference in the prices of "medicines" in India and countries like the United States, Canada and Australia. "It is mostly due to the patent regime in these countries that the prices of medicines are very high there, and exploiting this price difference, unscrupulous elements illegally export these medicines to these destinations from countries like India, where prices are comparatively less," said the official.

Interestingly, along with these medicines, the accused also start smuggling out pharmaceutical controlled drugs, involving narcotics and psychotropic tablets, for more and more money. The Internet being the safest place to strike the illegal deals, those operating from the source countries like India collect the orders through their agents sitting in the destination countries, following which they procure the medicines from various pharmaceutical manufacturing companies on various pretexts and then courier them to their clients. In this case, the mastermind was a doctor who allegedly exploited a provision in the Drugs and Cosmetics Act giving the doctors the status of pharmacists, thereby giving them the permission to procure medicines as per their requirement.

The NCB suspects that drugs and medicines are being pilfered and smuggled out to various countries by unscrupulous elements who might also be exploiting the Internet to strike deals as it involves huge money. In the latest case, the accused had made more than 7 million dollars in just over two years.

Alarmed over the kind of illegal transactions through pharmaceutical websites, the NCB is learnt to have decided to form a special team to track down transactions involving the smuggling of controlled drugs. "We already have officials who are expert at conducting Internet-related probe. As the Internet has no boundaries, any case pertaining to deals through the portals involves several countries and tracking down the accused becomes difficult. In such a scenario, we need to have a separate unit to keep surveillance on the suspected narcotics-related activities on the Internet," the official added.

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