The special team of the Narcotics Control Bureau, headed by Deputy Director (Operations) KPS Malhotra, which has flown down to Mumbai from their headquarters in Delhi to investigate allegations of drug abuse in the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, are making speedy headway into the case, and are also discovering more about the dark-web-enabled high-quality-marijuana trade in Mumbai.
Speaking to The News Minute, a member of the team said that the singular focus of their investigation, for now, is whether drug abuse played any role in Sushant death. While four people have been arrested so far for allegedly being part of the supply chain of drugs to Sushant and his girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty, the current primary target of investigations is Rhea’s brother, Showik. “We think Showik was at least one of the people through whom Rhea and Sushant sourced drugs,” an officer said, adding that the other person they are also investigating is Sushant’s house manager Samuel Miranda.
The NCB will also look into allegations of whether the late actor was 'lured' into using drugs. At the speed with which investigations are going, officers say that they should be able to ascertain in the next few days if drug abuse played a role in Sushant’s death. So far, investigators have not gathered any proof to indicate that.
According to investigations so far, three drugs seem to have been regularly consumed by various subjects of the investigation – cocaine, MDMA and marijuana. But the four arrests which have been made so far only cater to the supply of marijuana, a source in the NCB said.
NCB officers say that their investigation has also thrown fresh light on the high-quality marijuana trade in Mumbai. Traditionally, the weed found in the streets of India were locally grown and of poor quality. But with the proliferation of the global drug trade via the dark web, extremely potent qualities of marijuana have been hitting Indian shores in the past few years. The “dealers” in this trade are all users-turned-dealers. “The four we have arrested in the SSR case are very young guys, and from mostly upper-class families. They are not the typical street-level dealers. They have been ordering off the dark web, and selling the drugs here for good money,” an officer said. Officers estimate that they may have bought the marijuana from the dark web for about Rs. 1000 a gram, and were selling them for rates as high as Rs 5000 per gram.
Lab tests done by NCB show that the quality of marijuana confiscated from some of the arrested show high levels of THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) content. “Usually, Indian weed has 5-10%, but the ones we have confiscated show 28-40% THC. It was high-quality stuff,” says an officer, however adding that the presence of these high-quality drugs in India isn’t news to them. The findings in this investigation are in line with NCB’s understanding of the new generation of drug dealers in India.
With good legal counsel, and the confiscation of marijuana (if at all anything was confiscated from the four who have been arrested) being far less than the 1kg-threshold to be categorised as “commercial quantity” under the NDPS act, the accused are likely to avail bail soon, an officer said.
An officer also adds that the shrill and sensationalist coverage of the story in the media is only an impediment to their investigation. “We don’t see it as a major problem, but it surely is irritating. We can only go by the proof, and it doesn’t help the investigation when the media mounts so much pressure,” an officer told TNM.