From arms smuggling, to illicit trafficking to drugs and pretty much any trade which involves the movement of money, the most vulnerable point in the entire trade is the very last, the stage of consumption.
From the Bofors gun deal to the AugustaWestland chopper deal, the odour of corruption was smelt only when it reached the consumer. Because without the consumer there is no trade. The same works for the drug trade.
It is in this context that the Goa Chief Minister’s assurance in the House that 2018 shall be dedicated to end drugs and accidents’ should be taken. This assurance in the House must now be worked upon by the State police machinery and blue print must be ready by the beginning of 2018 detailing exactly how this assurance of the Chief Minister will be put to action. The purpose of this action plan should be to look at the source of consumption and then work backwards on both the money and distribution trail.
On the distribution trail, the strategy has to be two pronged. A team of local informers and police station cops should watch and bust the last leg of every trade point when the final peddler hands over drugs to the consumer. This can happen outside schools and institutions, some shacks as well as in some fixed points on the coastal belt. But to be honest, this is small change. In the drugs business it is all about scale and it’s all relative. If the assurance of the Chief Minister has to be executed, the deep rooted and credible suspicion that electronic dance parties are the biggest trigger and the biggest market for the drug trade in Goa, has to be taken as a basis for the crackdown.
Let’s be blunt – it all happens there. The sale of drugs happens because of these trance parties, held on the outdoors, in jungles, with foreign DJs with funny names (which are in many cases, obviously not the names in their passports). While the organisers of these parties will argue that drugs are not sold or consumed at their venues, do the police have to take this at face value? The nightclubs are beneficiaries, if not accomplices of the drug consumption because it helps their parties fill up.
The organisers make their money on entrance fees and the sale of water and mixers. In fact the sale of water is critical to the trance party business because drug consumers drink excess amounts to prevent their throats from getting dry. Here again, the pattern of water sales will lead the police straight to parties where drugs are consumed.
While this can be a part of strategy, there needs to be manpower restructuring in addition to a power augmentation of the ANC from 30 to 100. A mere increase of manpower will be self defeating. What is needed is to set up an autonomous Anti Narcotics task force under the SP who will report only to the DGP who will then report to the CM on a weekly basis. This is because the police force in the northern coastal belt has been compromised and while the ANC men will come from the same pool of men in uniform, they will be specially trained and every move of theirs captured and documented. They can be watched at every step of their duty hours, both for monitoring as well as training. As a part of the same exercise even malkahnas, where drugs are stored should have round the clock CCTV cameras, which work, with the ANC SP and DGP able to access footage live on their phones through internet. This should be done so that stories of rats eating all the stored drugs or the theft of drugs from the police malkahana, are not fed to the people
To begin with, in the coming ten days before 2017 closes, all the hotels and bars which sell drugs, which have been identified (as per the CM’s statement in the Assembly) should be raided and drugs recovered.
This should be the beginning of the crackdown, which will end drugs in Goa in 2018.
