One lakh bottles of codine laced cough syrup seized

The Narcotics wing of the Madhya Pradesh police has seized nearly one lakh bottles of codine laced cough syrup, worth around Rs 3 crore in the black market, being transport from Indore to the North East in the past one week, pointing to a new trend in drug smuggling said police officials. Two persons have been arrested so far.

ADG (Narcotics) Varun Kapoor said, “Use of codine laced cough syrup is prevalent in the North East, where it is used as a substitute for hard drugs, but this is the first time that we have come to know that Madhya Pradesh and especially Indore has become the transportation hub for these drugs.”

Officials said they seized these bottles from a truck being used for transporting the bottles and also from a godown in Lasudia area of Indore where it had been stored. These syrups had been sourced from a factory in Solan, Himachal Pradesh, then stored in the godown in Indore, from where it was being transported to North East.

The cough syrups had been cleverly hidden behind sacks of onion and potato in the truck seized by the narcotics wing on April 9. Initially the police arrested the truck driver Mohanlal Pathak (54) resident of Indore. On the basis of information provided by him, police arrested Ranjan Shukla (29) also resident of Indore, who had loaded the truck from the godown. However, another crucial link, Manish Bhaskar, owner of Anmol Medical Store, who had rented the godown in his name is absconding.

ADG Kapoor says that the investigations are still in a preliminary stage, but from the interrogation of the two accused we have come to know that smuggling had been going on for the past two years from Indore which is a major pharmaceutical manufacturing and transportation hub.