Sagar Biswas :
Despite continuous drives by different law-enforcing agencies, a large quantity of illegal drugs, particularly phensidyl, still enters the country everyday through the porous Bangladesh-India border, which becomes a major concern of the government high-ups.
Intelligence sources said, the drug syndicates mainly have targeted the young generation for consumption of their drugs as a large number of factories in Indian territory along the border produce phensidyl everyday to keep its supply uninterrupted.
When contacted, Additional Director General of Department of Narcotics Control [DNC], Md Ameer Hossain, told The New Nation on Monday, “The trafficking of phensidyl is yet not stopped. We will raise the issue in the next bilateral meeting with India to be held in the last week of March.”
“In the wake of severe pressure from Bangladesh government, the Indian authorities recently conducted an operation in its bordering areas and shutdown some illegal phensidyl factories. But there are still several phensidyl factories operating in the Indian border side,” he added.
Phensidyl, a popular item to the Bangladeshi drug addicts, is actually a mixture of codeine, a class ‘one’ narcotic liquid. It has been trafficked into Bangladesh by buses, trucks and other vehicles packed in baggage and luggage through the border areas.The illegal drug trade between Bangladesh and India is highest due to its vast bordering areas. Bangladesh has borders [west, east and north] with India on its three sides except the south, which stands on the Bay of Bengal. Apart from phensidyl, a huge quantity of other drugs, such as: charas, poppy seed, fermented wash [zauwa], bakhar, liquor, beer, pethidrine, morphine, buprenorphin injection, rectified sprit, denatured sprit, tablet [codinal, diazepam, etc.] toluene, acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, potassium permanganate, tetrahydrocanabinal and others are also entering the country taking the relaxed mood of law enforcing agencies, they further said. “The rising threat is now Yaba. It is entering the country in large volumes from Myanmar. We have already raised the Yaba issue to the Myanmar government in different levels. We will again raise the Yaba issue in the next bilateral meeting in April next,” Additional DG of DNC further said. Sources said, the trafficking zones for Yaba are the vast forests and terrain areas of Chittagong Hill Tracts while the transportations are Bangladeshi, Myanmar and Thai fishing trawlers, which are being safely used for trafficking the Yaba along the offshore of Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong.
DNC officials termed synthetic drug ‘heroin’ as another big problem, which is also widely used by young drug addicts.
The heroin usually produced in the North Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and India is generally trafficked into the foreign countries through Calcutta, Madras and Mumbai routes of India and through Thailand and Yangon, according to officials.
Meanwhile, the drug addiction at present is no more limited within the students and youths of university levels, it has already contaminated the very young boys of schools and colleges.
Though there is no district-wise survey and no specific statistics on the number of drug addicts in the district, the DNC officials said the number of drug addicts in total is over 2 million and it is growing alarmingly.
DNC officials said that several students of different educational institutions, including Dhaka University, Jahangirnagar University, Jagannath University, Dhaka Medical College, Dhaka College, private universities are getting addicted to drug abuse.
Around 25 percent students between the ages of 15 and 25 have inclined towards different forms of drug addiction in country’s educational institutions.
