Pot times July 15, 2005

Crime And Politics Of Opium Trade

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v05/n1117/a12.html
Newshawk: M & M Family

Pubdate: Fri, 15 Jul 2005
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2005 San Jose Mercury News
Contact: letters@mercurynews.com
Website: 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.