Dealing with the drug menace

India would do well to reconsider its drug laws to tackle abuse, argues DEVENDRA SAKSENA.

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Drug abuse is a global challenge, silently harming individuals, breaking families, weakening communities and encouraging crime. From New York to London to New Delhi, misguided youth seek solace in drugs.

Synthetic drugs like fentanyl (a synthetic opioid) and methamphetamine (a synthetic stimulant), and now nitazenes, have largely replaced traditional plant-based drugs like cocaine and heroin, because synthetic drugs can be made anywhere, at any time, requiring only chemicals, lab equipment and basic know-how. According to the US Centres for Disease Control, more than 48,000 Americans died in 2024 after taking drug mixtures containing fentanyl, which can be fatal in doses as small as 2 milligrams a day.

Worldwide, consumption of illicit drugs kills 600,000 people annually, and 100,000 more in drug wars. Drug trafficking flourishes because it generates windfall profits — drugs are sold at a hundred to one thousand times of their cost. Drug merchants are no more like yesteryear’s drug-lords but more like modern businessmen, with sophisticated supply and distribution chains, who communicate on the dark web, and accept payments in crypto currency. Drug traffickers sometimes deploy narco-submarines to cross oceans with their abominable cargo.

Despite the best efforts of US enforcement agencies, Mexican criminal gangs, known as the Sinaloa Cartel, and CJNG or the Jalisco Cartel, have penetrated deep into the US; supplying drugs even to isolated communities through clever use of social media and messaging applications. The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, labelled as “transnational criminal organizations” by US law enforcement agencies, are not just drug manufacturers and traffickers; to support drug trafficking, these cartels indulge in arms trafficking, money laundering, migrant smuggling, sex trafficking, bribery, extortion, and a host of other crimes — and have a global reach extending into Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.