The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) has said India has become one of the main sources of drugs sold through illegally operating Internet pharmacies that despatch orders placed with them from buyers in other countries, using courier or postal services.
In its latest annual report, the Vienna-based Board working under UN auspices says that since 2002, Indian law enforcement agencies have detected and disbanded several groups operating illegal Internet pharmacies.
For example, in 2007, Indian authorities identified a software solutions company allowing illegal transactions involving pharmaceutical preparations to be made over the Internet. The following year, three Internet pharmacies operating in India and illegally selling psychotropic substances to buyers in the US were shut down, the report says, while urging India to put in place measures to prevent the use of the Internet to divert controlled substances.
INCB has also been urging the governments to either prohibit or closely control sales of internationally controlled substances by Internet pharmacies and telephone call centres so that illicit supply channels can be closed.
Stating that the South Asian region has become a location for the manufacture of amphetamine-type stimulants, the report says a large number of clandestine methamphetamine laboratories have been discovered in India in recent years. It draws attention to how highly organised and powerful criminal networks are using new processes, routes and substances to keep drug manufacturing operations alive and how, even amid strict controls of chemicals, traffickers are finding ingenious ways to obtain the chemicals they need from legal trade channels.
The INCB report points out that as one of the world's largest manufacturers of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, India remains by far one of the principal sources of these precursor chemicals used in the illicit manufacture of amphetamine-type stimulants.
