India’s west coast is reportedly the new ‘favourite’ for Pakistan-based drug cartels to traffic drugs to Europe, Canada, and the United States, vice.com reports on August 19. The 1,600-kilometre coastline of the state of Gujarat is the key location to smuggle drugs because of its vast expanse covered with hundreds of unmanned jetties. In fact, since July 2018, Indian agencies have seized over 2,200 kilogram of heroin in Gujarat’s coast, worth more than INR 60 billion, all attributed to Pakistan and Afghanistan-based drug cartels.
Gujarat reportedly became a preferred spot because other traditional routes, such as the one around Iran, shut down after international authorities tightened vigilance. Earlier, the drug cartels chose what they call the ‘Golden Crescent’—referring to Asia’s two key opium-producing regions, which overlap Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan—to traffic drugs to the West. But this has now come under a close watch from maritime task forces of countries such as the US and Australia.
This has been leading to Pakistani cartels increasingly looking to India as a trade route.
Reports also point out that the plentiful opium crop harvest of approximately 10,000 tons in Afghanistan this year (2019) the highest over the last few years, may have accelerated the drug trafficking cases. “We only know about the large seizures,” said a Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) official.