Chandigarh: Last month, 33-year-old Harpreet Singh, the elder brother of Khadoor Sahib MP and radical Sikh activist Amritpal Singh, was arrested for alleged possession and consumption of crystal methamphetamine, popularly known as the party drug ‘Ice’.
Harpreet Singh alias ‘Happy’ was arrested by the Jalandhar rural police along with his alleged accomplice Lovepreet Singh. According to the police, the two had secured the ‘Ice’ from one Sandeep Arora, a resident of Ludhiana, who too was arrested.
Harpreet Singh’s is not a lone case of the police finding ‘Ice’ in circulation among drug networks in Punjab. In a palpable shift in the smuggling of narcotics from the India-Pakistan border into the state, smugglers are now veering more towards pushing the synthetic drug instead of opium-based heroin or ‘chitta’.
The Punjab Police’s crackdown on international drug smugglers in recent months has pointed towards a growing “shortage” of heroin — following the ban on its cultivation in Afghanistan by the Taliban — forcing smugglers to try and retain their “markets” through alternative drugs. The police have reported a sharp increase in recovery of ‘Ice’ from smugglers — from half a kg last year to over 16 kg in the first six months of 2024.
“Smugglers are even resorting to manufacturing Ice, smuggling precursor chemicals to fill the vacuum (caused by a shortage of heroine),” Punjab Director General of Police (DGP) Gaurav Yadav said in a press statement last month, following the arrests of three alleged drug smugglers from Amritsar.
While ‘Ice’ or crystal methamphetamine is a synthetic drug produced from pseudoephedrine, a nasal decongestant found in over-the-counter medications, heroin is a plant-based drug derived from opium, which is extracted from the poppy plant. In April 2022, the Taliban de-facto authorities had banned all cultivation of opium in Afghanistan.
“The change is clear. The recovery amount of heroin is steadily coming down while that of Ice is increasing,” a top officer on Punjab’s drug control task force told ThePrint, not wanting to be named. “In at least one case in which our teams recovered low quality heroin, the consignment also contained Ice that had been sent free of cost, encouraging the smugglers to shift from heroin and then bringing about a similar shift in the consumption habits of drug addicts.”
According to police sources, the street price of ‘Ice’ is Rs 5,000 per gram, while that of heroin or ‘chitta’ is Rs 2,000 per gram.
The change is forcing the police to trace networks distributing ‘Ice’ and those supplying precursor chemicals to those who use it to prepare the synthetic drug in labs.
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Ice by drone
One of the first cases of smuggling of ‘Ice’ into Punjab that hit national headlines was in 2013, when a former wrestler-turned-policeman Jagdish Bhola was arrested with its precursor chemical pseudoephedrine.
Bhola, an Arjuna awardee, was found to be the kingpin of an international smuggling ring that dealt in ‘Ice’. He was convicted by a CBI court in 2019 for smuggling of drugs, and diverting precursor chemicals procured from factories manufacturing pharmaceuticals. As many as 21 people part of his ring were also convicted by the CBI court.
Apart from the CBI, Bhola and his associates were investigated by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for violations under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
On Tuesday, a special PMLA court in Mohali sentenced Bhola along with 17 others to 10 years’ imprisonment in the drug money laundering case.
On 20 July, the Amritsar Commissionerate of Police apprehended three alleged drug smugglers including big fish Chheharta Gurbax alias Lala of Chheharta, seizing 1 kg of ‘Ice’, 2.45 kg heroin and 520 grams of pseudoephedrine.
“Lala has been actively sourcing the precursor chemicals, used to adulterate crude heroin to increase its potent effect, and to manufacture crystal methamphetamine (Ice),” said DGP Yadav.
In May this year, a counter intelligence (CI) team of the Amritsar police had arrested one Avtar Singh of Kakkar village with 4 kg ‘Ice’ and 1 kg heroin. The police said Avtar was directly in touch with a Pakistan-based drug smuggler who had used drones to deliver this drug consignment from across the border.
In January, Amritsar police arrested Simranjit Singh alias Simar Maan, a resident of Gaggarmal village in Amritsar, with 2 kg ‘Ice’, a highly sophisticated .30-bore Chinese pistol, and five live cartridges in his possession. DGP Yadav had at the time said preliminary investigations revealed that the accused was directly in touch with Pakistan-based smugglers Pathan and Amer, who were supplying him with ‘Ice’ and weapons from across the border using a drone.
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Opium production decline in Afghanistan, effect on Punjab
According to a November 2023 research brief from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which carried out a survey of Afghanistan’s opium cultivation, in 2023, opium poppy cultivation and opium production dramatically declined in that country after the Taliban announced a ban prohibiting “poppy cultivation and all types of narcotics” in April 2022.
“Nationally, area under opium cultivation declined by 95% to a total of just 10,800 ha, indicating that farmers were adhering to the ban that was announced in April 2022,” states the UNODC report.
“Opium production saw a similar 95% decline from 6,200 tons produced in 2022 to 333 tons in 2023. The total 2023 opium harvest could be converted into 24-38 tons heroin of export quality (50–70% purity). In 2022 that amount was 350-580 tons,” adds the report.
These numbers are now reflected in the drug recoveries made in Punjab, considered a gateway for opium smuggling from Afghanistan via Pakistan as part of the ‘Golden Crescent’ (Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan) drug trade route.
In 2023, the Punjab Police had recovered a total of 1,359.22 kg of heroin, averaging almost 132 kg per month. This year, until the third week of July, 554 kg of heroin has been recovered, averaging almost 80 kg a month. The recovery of ‘Ice’ on the other hand has shot up from 0.54 kg in 2023 to 16.9 kg this year, until the third week of July.
“The quality of recovered heroin has also gone down substantially as compared to earlier years. Generally the recovered heroin used to be of 85-95 percent purity. This has now gone down to 30-35 percent. This too means that there is a shortage of heroin and that it is being mixed with other things,” said the drug control task force officer quoted earlier.
Disaster, say Punjab de-addiction specialists
According to doctors engaged in the state health department’s de-addiction programmes, the shift from heroin to ‘Ice’ spells disaster.
“Ice is mainly a party drug and is most often used in metro cities. Large number of populations have till date not been affected by it. Most of the population of addicts in Punjab is using heroin or chitta. Though all forms of drug addiction are harmful for health, Ice addiction has a different effect on behaviour compared to heroin, as it is a stimulant unlike heroin, which is a depressant,” Dr Sandeep Bhola, who heads the health department’s de-addiction programme in Kapurthala, told ThePrint.
He added that his clinic is yet to receive a patient addicted to Ice. “We get cases of poly drug addicts who are using multiple things which includes Ice as well.”
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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