A number of recent official and non-governmental reports have highlighted India’s role in the global narcotics trade.
“Multiton consignments of precursor materials from India have been shipped to Africa and Mexico,” reads the US state department’s annual report on international narcotics control strategy, released in March.
“This trend is expected to continue and expand.”
While data on the total volume of Indian chemical supplies to illicit drug producers is not publicly available, exports of ephedrine, used to make methamphetamine, increased to more than 77 tons in 2020, up from almost 58 tons the year before, the report shows.
The latest annual report by the International Narcotics Control Board, an independent body that monitors compliance with United Nations drug conventions, notes, “The large chemical and pharmaceutical industries in India are vulnerable to the diversion of products to illicit markets by criminal networks.”
It also warns that “the risk of diversion of illicitly manufactured fentanyl, methamphetamine, opioids and other substances and their trafficking within and out of India is expected to increase”.
Likewise, a bipartisan US commission on combating synthetic opioid trafficking recently found that India “is not far behind its eastern neighbour as a major producer of drugs and controlled chemicals that make their way into illegal drug supplies”.
India’s large chemical and pharmaceutical industry has an even weaker regulatory and legislative regime than China’s giant sector, according to a recent study released in March by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank.
The study examines the evolution of China’s anti-drug policies and offers the first extensive analysis of its law enforcement cooperation with the US and other countries, while also including new research about India’s role in the trade.
“In both countries you have very politically powerful, quite unruly chemical and pharmaceutical industries that hate oversight,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the report and director of the initiative on non-state armed actors at Brookings.
China was for years the leading source of illegal fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid that has fuelled the deadliest drug epidemic in US history, with overdose fatalities reaching a record of nearly 106,000 in the year ending October 2021, according to the latest data.
In 2019, China bowed to intense US pressure to curb synthetic opioid trafficking by scheduling fentanyl and its analogues – or classifying them based on their medical value and potential for abuse.
This helped to greatly reduce the volume of finished fentanyl flowing directly from China to North America.
But Chinese traffickers rapidly adapted by selling unscheduled chemicals to drug producers in Mexico, who then used those ingredients to manufacture fentanyl and smuggle it into the U.S.
Mexican cartels have also allegedly “developed a network of suppliers of precursor or finished synthetic drugs in India”, according to the Brookings report, while Chinese traffickers have worked with Indians to circumvent restrictions in China, according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
India, like China, has long been a source of chemical precursors for the production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine in the Golden Triangle, where Laos, Myanmar and Thailand intersect.
Fentanyl is not scheduled in India, and restrictions were relaxed further when it was classified as an essential medical drug in 2014.
However, India has controlled some fentanyl and methamphetamine precursors.
The Chinese, Indian and US governments did not respond to Nikkei Asia’s requests for comment.
Policymakers are concerned that if China were to further crack down on its domestic suppliers, “India could become the next source of precursor chemicals”, said Bryce Pardo, associate director of the drug policy research centre at the Rand Corporation, who was involved in the US opioid commission.
However, India has its own growing problem of domestic opioid misuse, which could force the government to take firmer action against the synthetic drug trade, Vanda Felbab-Brown said.
The United Nations in March scheduled three more precursors used in fentanyl production at the 2022 session of its Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which makes international drug control policy.
“Traffickers will find it harder, riskier and more costly to source the chemicals for their illicit business,” Martin Raithelhuber, a synthetic drugs expert at the UN office on drugs and crime, told Nikkei Asia.
Still, it is unlikely that scheduling these and other precursors will eliminate the synthetic drugs trade because illicit producers can bypass regulations by tweaking the molecular structure of existing chemicals or invent new, uncontrolled precursors.
Regulating dual-use chemicals could also undermine legitimate businesses.
“Many of these chemicals have such wide use in legal industries and legal pharmaceutical companies that they will simply never be scheduled,” said Felbab-Brown.
Mexican cartels have enlisted skilled chemists to devise novel formulas for synthetic drugs, her report notes.
US agencies are concerned that the Mexicans are vertically integrating drug production and doing more of the synthesis “in house”, Pardo said.
Drug producers in the Golden Triangle also employ Chinese and Taiwanese chemists, according to the Brookings report, and appear to be using non-scheduled chemicals to make methamphetamine.
Myanmar is also a “likely candidate for eventual fentanyl production”, the report says, because of its “synthetic drug production infrastructure”, drug trafficking networks, and other factors.
There is not yet evidence of widespread fentanyl use in Asia, but consumption could be higher than is known, Felbab-Brown said, and she believes it is “only a matter of time” before the drug comes to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
According to the US state department report, “Pakistani agencies reported a slight increase in synthetic fentanyl seizures” last year.
Nikkei asked the state department and Pakistani government for further information about these seizures, but did not receive a response.
While China recently voted with the US to schedule the fentanyl precursors, its counternarcotics cooperation with Washington has been in decline, especially since the US blamed China for the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Brookings report.
India, too, has at times been unwilling to cooperate with foreign countries on drugs, although its collaborative efforts with the US have improved in recent years, Felbab-Brown said.