In the first five months of 2017, the ANC seized mephedrone worth Rs 8 crore, a whopping three-fold hike from the estimated worth of Mephedrone seized during the entire previous year.
Three years ago, after the Anti Narcotics Cell (ANC) of the Mumbai Police was confronted with a new drug menace in the form of locally manufactured Mephedrone (MD), it spearheaded the process to get the drug notified as a scheduled psychotropic substance under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985. This led to MD being brought under the ambit of the Act in 2015.
Two years on, with the number of mephedrone seizures in the city only increasing, the Mumbai Police's ANC is struggling to effectively tackle the cases, as it is hamstrung by the lack of basic MD testing kits. The need for such kits is most acutely felt when, in a number of cases, seized drug samples stated to be Mephedrone by the police, turn out to be a non-psychotropic substances on chemical analysis. MD testing kits can provide on-the-spot confirmation on the presence of Mephedrone in drug samples seized by the police.
In the first five months of 2017, the ANC seized mephedrone worth Rs 8 crore, a whopping three-fold hike from the estimated worth of Mephedrone seized during the entire previous year.
It was earlier valued at approximately Rs 2 crore.
Since January 2015, the ANC has made repeated requests to the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), a central government agency, to provide them MD testing kits. However, so far, the NCB has expressed it's inability to provide the kits.
Deputy Commissioner of Police, ANC, Shivdeep Lande recently raised the issue at a meeting of a Joint Task Force comprising senior officers from ANC, NCB, Customs and Directorate of Revenue Intelligence.
According to ANC officials, in the absence of any MD detection kits, the probe into drug cases get delayed as drug samples that are seized have to be sent for chemical analysis (CA) to the forensic science laboratory, which takes at least a month to send its report.
"The mephedrone detection kit is important for all drug enforcement agencies as it would speed up their investigations. Lack of testing kits sometimes lead to controversies and leave the police embarrassed, as it has been witnessed in the past that the seized material which police had claimed to be MD turned out to be something else," said Ayaz Khan, senior lawyer handling a majority of NDPS cases.
Speaking to DNA, NCB Zonal Director Sanjay Jha said,"We have kits for all other drugs like cocaine and heroin, but not for MD. We have asked the Hindustan Antibiotics Limited (HAL) to supply the kits to us. The HAL is doing research on it and in India, no agency has the kit as of now. We are checking the machine's durability and the shelf-life. ANC had contacted us for the same purpose. We are also following this with our headquarter in Delhi as well as with HAL. As we are a nodal agency, we will have to provide the kit to all the enforcement authorities in Maharashtra."
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