The dope on dope

Heroin has a mesmerising influence on politics, cricket and other seemingly innocent activities that no one even remotely associates with the drug nexus

Namit Verma Delhi

FM Pierce, a chemist at Owens College Manchester and the first analyst of the effects of heroin, had reported to its inventor CR Alder Wright in 1874: "Doses … were subcutaneously injected into young dogs and rabbits … with the following general results … great prostration, fear, and sleepiness speedily following the administration, the eyes being sensitive, and pupils dilated, considerable salivation being produced in dogs and slight tendency to vomiting... Respiration was at first quickened, but subsequently reduced, and the heart's action was diminished, and rendered irregular.” Rahul Mahajan was admitted into Apollo Hospital with remarkably similar symptoms. Bibek Moitra was reported to have suffered identical symptoms before his death. Every expert in town knew it was a heroin death, but the doctors at Apollo and a large section of the media kept talking cocaine for the first few days. There was something amiss and the entire nation was agog to know every detail of how the political class would rescue one of their own from the clutches of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985. 

Heroin is big money. Pharmaceuticals have always been big money, rogue pharmaceuticals even more so. Since its inception as a non-addictive morphine substitute and paediatric cough medication marketed by Bayer towards the end of the nineteenth century, heroin has been a money-spinner. Once the truth of the addictive nature of heroin came out, Bayer withdrew the medicine shortly before the First World War; but by then Europe's first generation of heroin addicts was roaming the world; and the war itself became the depressive cause as well as the medium of propagation of the heroin habit globally.

Two decades later when IG Farben on the German side of the war swallowed up Bayer, the Allies made their own deal with heroin. US military intelligence made a deal with mafia boss Lucky Luciano and released him from prison, giving him a free run of Sicily to establish heroin hegemony, in return for neutralising Axis and Communist forces in southern Europe. Luciano set up heroin factories in Sicily. His financiers included corrupt Nazi generals and sinister bankers desperate to get their gold across to safer havens.

The global law enforcement crackdown against heroin had to wait until the Single Convention on Narcotics in 1964. This was substantially strengthened by the 1972 Protocol Amending the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988.

Beginning 1964, this new regime of narcotics controls and bans saw the termination of the system of opium sales through auctioned government vends in India. This was a major setback for many Indian business houses which had a large presence in the opium growing and brokerage businesses.