When Anshul moved to Mumbai in 2003 as an aspiring Bollywood actor, it was the middle-class boy’s portal to a word of glamour, money and extravagance. But it was also his entry to a life-threatening cocaine addiction.

“It’s a different world and lifestyle,” he says. “I’d just bagged my first Bollywood role and I wanted to fit in, so when my friends at a party were doing cocaine, I too decided to do it.”

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Like most users who have experimented with drugs, Anshul never thought he would become addicted. Three years later he nearly died of an overdose. “That was a wake-up call. For the first time in my life, I was scared of death,” he says.

With India experiencing huge economic growth in recent years, Anshul is just one of a growing number of middle and upper-class Indians experimenting with the drug.

Rakesh’s introduction to cocaine was less glamourous. A business professional who grew up in New Delhi in a fairly well-off family, he first tried the drug in high school. “I never used it because of peer pressure but I wanted to know what it was all about. I could always afford it.”

It soon started to catch up with him and his friends. Of the 50 people Rakesh knows who have used cocaine, two have died from overdoses. He has since sought help: “I have suffered from nightmares, sweating, paranoia and breathlessness.”

The Delhi chapter of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) has worked with former drug addicts like Rakesh since 1992. Each meeting has almost 30 individuals attending it every other day. The numbers attending due to cocaine abuse have remained consistent over the last few years, according to an NA official, even though it’s an expensive habit. “Even if these individuals have to steal money, they go ahead and do that.”

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Dr Sanjeev Jain, professor, department of psychiatry, at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, believes drug addiction should be treated as an economic issue in India. “Drugs follow disposable income,” he says, explaining many professionals he’s seen got started taking cocaine to reduce stress and anxiety about work.

But while there’s been reports of people using cocaine in India since the end of the nineteenth century it’s only in recent years that drug trafficking has become an increasingly organised business in India.



Nearly 47kgs of cocaine was seized from traffickers in 2013, according to the Narcotics Control Bureau’s (NCB) 2013 annual report, which found an increase in the number of cocaine cases from 72 in 2012 to 78 in 2013.



The rise in cocaine busts reflects a wider trend in drug seizures across the country. According to government data, between 2011-2013, the quantity of illegal drugs seized across India jumped 455%.

“India has become a trafficking centre for other countries,” says Prem Anand Sinha, the Chennai zonal director of the NCB, who has already seen six cocaine seizures reported in Chennai this year. “The cocaine supplied here is not only meant for India; traffickers exploit this route to enter other countries.”



In response, enforcement agencies in India have stepped up their vigil, partly explaining why more seizures of commercial quantity cocaine have been made this year in Delhi compared with the last few years, said Rohit Sharma, Delhi zonal director, NCB.

Recent seizures of cocaine in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and of mules carrying cocaine personally on flights to India, also reflects the growing popularity of South American drug cartels exploring new trafficking routes in South Asia, says Christine Albertine, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.



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Albertine says there has been a diversification of cocaine markets in the last two decades, with the drug, produced in Bolivia, Columbia and Peru, now more frequently traveling through West Africa to Gulf countries and South Asia.



Romesh Bhattacharji, former narcotics commissioner of India, is not surprised by the increase in trafficking that’s come with the country’s economic boom though. He insists India would not be used as a supply route if there wasn’t already a high level of interest in the drug within the country.



“It is time to wake up. Contraband heads for spots where there is demand. These seizures are only a small fraction of what is being smuggled in.”

Some names have been changed.

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