Surfeit of suffering

India is the world’s largest producer of legal opium, the raw material for codeine, morphine and other painkillers. But corruption and red tape have left thousand of Indians such as Nevatia to die in agony.

And strict licensing hasn’t stopped drug gangs from diverting opium meant for medicines to smuggling routes shared by heroin and morphine traffickers, gun-runners and Muslim militants, police say.

“Organized crime and politics join together in this to make life miserable,” said A. Shankar Rao, zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau, a national police unit.

Mala Srivastava, the federal official who oversees the licensing system, denied that it had serious flaws. “Whatever little diversion there is, is internal,” she said. “We have never heard of Indian opium, or Indian heroin, traveling abroad.”

But the US State Department’s annual report on narcotics control strategy calls India “a modest but growing producer of heroin for the international market”.

In an effort to keep opium out of criminal hands, India’s federal and state governments license every step of the process. But officials who issue the permits often don’t answer the phone, are away from their desks or let applications languish for weeks, doctors and pharmacists complain.

Dhruva Kumar Ray, 32, is dying of stomach cancer at Kolkata’s Nirmal Hriday hospice. He is in great pain but is given only antibiotics. The hospice staff said they had received a donation of morphine pills but gave them to a needier hospital

“We have so many patients suffering,” said Dr. Dwarkadas K. Baheti, a pain management specialist at Bombay Hospital. “After two or three months, suddenly we have no morphine left, and for the next month, none is available. … I feel helpless.”

Indians who have money often turn to an expensive opium-based medicine imported from the United States because it is easier to get than cheap, locally produced morphine. Nevatia’s family paid a Calcutta pharmacist about $10 for each Johnson & Johnson Durogesic patch, more than five times the cost of a three-day supply of opium tablets.

“With the support of local police and politicians, they convert this opium into smack,” slang for heroin, said Vinod Kumar Shahi, a lawyer in Lucknow, capital of northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state. Shahi has learned a lot about the drug trade in 20 years of defending many of the region’s top gangsters.

Stretching hundreds of miles, northern India’s opium belt is a harsh place, where a spring breeze can be like a blast from an oven and outlaw chemists work through the night by candlelight, turning opium gum into morphine base. India’s opium route starts on small plots in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, the only three states where farmers are licensed to grow opium poppies. They are also among the poorest and most corrupt and crime-ridden regions of the country.

The village of Jaithpur, in Uttar Pradesh state, is next to a brick-paved road that runs through fields of wheat, potatoes and mint. Children soap up and squat to shower beneath the spouts of hand pumps, and roadside tailors power sewing machines by pumping pedals.

Meanwhile, those who need the painkilling peace that opium-based drugs brings go without. “The pain is spreading,” Nevatia said from his bed, in a raspy whisper, in May. “It’s all over the body.” He was reluctant to complain.

On May 21, he died in his bedroom.

LAT-WP