Chandigarh:
One of the major reasons why Punjab is not winning its war against drugs is that the warriors themselves are apparently sabotaging it from within. Coordination between the two principal government departments -- Health and Police -- which act as enforcement agencies, has been missing. While the health department is to regulate the stock and ensure that medicines sold and stored match the prescription, the police department ensures that no banned or illicit drugs are in the store.
The murder of activist Parvinder Singh Jhota in Mansa has underlined that some rogue chemists are fearlessly selling banned, controlled and habit-forming pills under the nose of health department officials. Reports say the accused chemist was notorious for violating the drug licence issued to him, as five cases were registered against him, three of which were with the district magistrate. What exposes both the police and health department in this case is that accused Ashwani's medical store was raided as many as 10 times during the past four years, and his licence was suspended multiple times.
Sources say Ashwani's chemist shop could reopen anyway, as he has been operating it in his wife's name. It is not known whether the couple were qualified druggists or had employed someone else for that purpose. The question is why the family was allowed to run the business when they had violated the Drugs Act multiple times.
Senior Punjab officials have been claiming they were conducting searches routinely, but what they did not tell was how and why the accused chemist Ashwani was granted a firearms licence when he was facing five criminal cases. The Mansa SSP has confirmed Ashwani had one licensed weapon, but reports claimed he had two licences, one for a .12-bore gun and the other for the .30-bore pistol allegedly used to kill the activist Parvinder Jhota.
Law and Order ADGP PK Sinha maintains the Mansa incident was a "multi-agency" case as the police had a limited role in controlling sale of drugs. It was the duty of the drug controllers to check whether the drugs being sold were prescribed by the doctors.
The internal sabotage to the 'Yudh Nasheyan Virudh' is not limited to a lack of coordination between the Health Department and the police, but the cops deployed at strategic locations to stop drug smuggling were also found working as couriers.
A day after the anti-drug activist Jhota was killed in Mansa, the BSF arrested a Punjab Police constable, Karandeep Singh, with 15 kg of heroin. He was posted at the anti-drone system in the jurisdiction of the Khalra police station. Initial interrogation revealed that he had allegedly facilitated cross-border smuggling networks while battling his own addiction. Investigators are examining his bank accounts, property holdings and possible links to earlier consignments. Sources said he owned two cars.
The arrest adds to a series of cases in which Punjab Police personnel have been found involved in the narcotics trade. In 2024, a Ferozepur head constable was arrested with 2 kg of heroin while allegedly transporting a consignment. In 2023, police nabbed a driver attached to a DSP in Amritsar after recovering 1.5 kg of heroin from his vehicle. In 2022, two constables in Batala were booked for possessing commercial quantities of narcotics, while in 2021 a suspended constable was arrested in Jalandhar for alleged links with a cross-border heroin smuggling network.
Raj Jit Singh Hundal, a dismissed Assistant Inspector General of the Punjab Police, was arrested by the Anti-Narcotics Task Force from a house in Darshan Singh Nagar, Patiala, on September 24, 2026. The arrest came days after the Supreme Court directed him to surrender. He had been absconding since April 2023, when the Punjab government dismissed him after the Special Investigation Team submitted reports to the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Those reports and the subsequent dismissal order focused heavily on his tenure as Senior Superintendent of Police, Tarn Taran, during which dismissed Inspector Inderjit Singh served as CIA in-charge. According to the official findings, more than 50 samples in NDPS cases failed under suspicious circumstances during this period. The SIT and government order concluded that the two officers colluded to shield drug traffickers, implicate innocent persons in false cases, and weaken investigations.
The alleged modus operandi centred on exploiting technical and procedural loopholes in the NDPS Act. Investigators found that the duo allegedly delayed forensic samples, ensured that chemical tests failed, under-reported seized quantities, and used their knowledge of the law to help smugglers secure bail or acquittal. Related allegations against Inderjit included siphoning recovered narcotics for resale and planting drugs on individuals for extortion. The government order stated that Raj Jit Singh was fully aware of these technicalities and used them, along with Inderjit, to protect traffickers while accumulating wealth. The unusually high number of failed samples remains one of the strongest pieces of evidence cited against him.
Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann's 2022 video statement given in the state assembly has gone viral, meanwhile, in which he says it was not just the smuggled opioids or heroin via Rajasthan or Jammu and Kashmir but the misuse of medical drugs being manufactured within the state that was responsible for the state's drug problem. However, the AAP and Congress changed their narrative and, instead of sticking to that stance, now blame smuggling from other states and across the border.
Habit-forming pharmaceutical drugs (especially benzodiazepines such as Alprazolam, Nitrazepam, and Clonazepam) are a recognised and growing problem in Punjab, backed by large seizures and treatment data. The closest official figures put current sedative users in the range of nearly 10 lakh people, with about 2 lakh needing treatment for pharmaceutical sedative-related problems.
Under the 'Yudh Nasheyan Virudh' campaign, Punjab Police and federal agencies have heavily targeted non-opioid syndicates. Over 6.2 million (62 lakh) intoxicant tablets, capsules, and pharma-sedatives-primarily Alprazolam, Nitrazepam, and Clonazepam-were confiscated.
In a single inter-state border operation, the central narcotics bureau intercepted 6.67 million illicit psychotropic tablets, including 5.9 million Alprazolam pills. Standalone synthetic stimulant seizures reached 26 kg to 28 kg of Crystal Meth (ICE), with a significant portion intercepted from cross-border drone drops. To dismantle these networks, authorities registered 59,000 FIRs and seized up to Rs 16.81 crore in illicit drug money.
According to the Magnitude of Substance Use in India (2019) survey conducted by the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC), AIIMS, for the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, approximately 9.93 lakh people in Punjab were current users of sedatives, while around 2 lakh needed help for problems related to pharmaceutical sedatives. Punjab ranks among the top states in the country for the absolute number of people using sedatives.
Parliamentary Standing Committee reports citing the same survey and related data have repeatedly noted that the state has roughly 66-74 lakh total drug users, including cannabis, opioids, and sedatives, of which sedative users form a notable share. Household surveys by PGIMER-Chandigarh, conducted between 2016 and 2022, estimated that about 15.4% of Punjab's population was engaged in some form of substance use. Alcohol and tobacco dominate these figures, followed by opioids, while pharmaceutical sedatives and other diverted medicines appear as a smaller but consistent secondary category. The Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey (PODS) of 2015 focused only on opioids and reported that pharmaceutical opioids accounted for 14% of dependent opioid users; it did not cover benzodiazepines.
Taken together, these findings show that while alcohol, tobacco, and opioids remain the largest drivers of substance use in Punjab, the misuse of pharmaceutical sedatives has emerged as a significant and persistent secondary problem.
The gap between the number of current users and those needing help also points to a substantial treatment gap. This pattern suggests that diverted prescription medicines, including habit-forming tablets and capsules, are steadily adding to Punjab's broader substance use burden and require focused regulatory and treatment attention alongside efforts against heroin and alcohol. Investigations say that non-compliant pharmacies, located in Punjab and in neighbouring states, were involved in the diversion of legally manufactured drugs such as buprenorphine, tramadol and alprazolam, which were consumed without doctors' prescriptions.
Comprehensive health surveys provide critical insights into substance consumption patterns in Punjab, extending beyond traditional opioids and heroin. In foundational studies such as the Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey (PODS) conducted by AIIMS and the Society for Promotion of Youth & Masses (SPYM), pharmaceutical opioids -- including prescription painkillers and synthetic opioids diverted for non-medical use -- accounted for 14 per cent of dependent opioid users in the state. Heroin made up about 53 per cent of such users, while traditional opium, doda, and phukki accounted for around 33 per cent .
National surveys by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, along with reports from the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC), further show that Punjab experiences a significantly higher-than-average prevalence of alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders compared to the national average. Patterns of substance use also include cannabis and prescription sedatives, which fall under the broader classification of psychoactive and pharmaceutical drug misuse.
While exact standalone percentages for every category of non-opioid pharmaceutical drugs, tranquillisers, or over-the-counter medications fluctuate, public health data consistently highlight that the abuse of diverted prescription drugs and sedatives forms a substantial segment of the state's overall substance use challenge, alongside major dependencies on alcohol and heroin.
Punjab's long-running war on drugs has been undermined by two parallel problems: the continued availability of habit-forming pharmaceutical drugs such as high-strength Pregabalin despite local bans, and repeated cases in which members of the very force tasked with stopping the trade have been caught facilitating it.