NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that punishment for possessing banned drug under Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act would depend on the quantity of banned substance seized from the person and not on purity of the illicit drug.By this ruling, a three-judge bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Indira Banerjee and M R Shah reversed SC's 2008 judgment in E Micheal Raj case, in which the court had ruled that since adulterated drugs contained several neutral substances which are not psychotropic in nature, it would be wrong to punish a person based on weight of seized drug. It had ruled that the punishment for possessing drugs, whether small or commercial quantity, would be based after determining the weight of pure banned substance and not by entire weight of seized drug.Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Shah accepted additional solicitor general Aman Lekhi 's argument that the 2008 judgment would make it difficult to punish drug-paddlers. Lekhi agued that a 'small' quantity of heroin is 5gm, which if taken as pure drug could translate to 100gm of street level heroin. "At the rate of 0.25 gm per dose, 100 gm can translate to 400 doses and the legislature could not have intended to let off one paddling 100 gm, which could be 5gm of pure heroin, through 400 doses as a small quantity attracting just 6 months imprisonment," he had argued.The bench said, "illicit drugs are seldom sold in a pure form. They are almost always adulterated or cut with other substance. Caffeine is mixed with heroin, it causes that heroin to vaporize at a lower rate. That could allow users to take the drug faster and get a big punch sooner. Aspirin, crushed tablets, they could have enough powder to amend reversal doses of drugs. Take example of heroin. It is known as powerful and illegal street drug and opiate derived from morphine . This drug can easily be “cut” with a variety of different substances. This means that drug dealer will add other drugs or non -intoxicating substances to the drug so that they can sell more of it at a lesser expense to themselves""Even mixture of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substance is more dangerous. Therefore, what is harmful or injurious is the entire mixture/tablets with neutral substance and Narcotic Drugs or Psychotropic Substances. Therefore, if it is accepted that it is only the actual content by weight of offending drug which is relevant for the purpose of determining whether it would constitute small quantity or commercial quantity, in that case, the object and purpose of enactment of NDPS Act would be frustrated. There may be few punishment for “commercial quantity”. Certainly that would not have been the intention of the legislature," it said.It said, in classification of seized narcotic drug as 'small' or 'commercial' quantity the purity of the drug is not to be taken into count. "In case of seizure of mixture of Narcotic Drugs or Psychotropic Substances with one or more neutral substance(s), the quantity of neutral substance(s) is not to be excluded and to be taken into consideration along with actual content by weight of the offending drug, while determining the “small or commercial quantity” of the Narcotic Drugs or Psychotropic Substance," Justice Shah said.