Drug Peddlers change routes to up their game
Hyderabad: As the surveillance on the flow and transportation of marijuana in the State intensifies, drug peddlers appear to be looking for newer routes and places to transport the psychotropic drug substances clandestinely from the agency areas in Andhra Pradesh. The recent arrests by the police that disrupted the transport chain show that drug peddlers […]
Hyderabad: As the surveillance on the flow and transportation of marijuana in the State intensifies, drug peddlers appear to be looking for newer routes and places to transport the psychotropic drug substances clandestinely from the agency areas in Andhra Pradesh.
The recent arrests by the police that disrupted the transport chain show that drug peddlers could be looking at Hyderabad as transit route for the marijuana business, connecting to various States and storage units.
Earlier, Hyderabad and city outskirts were used to store drugs by drug peddlers and gangs after getting transported from agency areas in Andhra Pradesh and Andhra-Odisha Border (AOB) — from where reportedly nearly 90 per cent of the marijuana comes.
Of late, there have been instances of the drug being transported from the AOB to Maharashtra and Karnataka via Hyderabad. Now, with the intensified crackdown on drugs across the State, drug peddlers have shifted their locations to Maharashtra and are choosing Hyderabad as only a route.
The tri-commissionerate police — Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Rachakonda, where the latter two cover majority of the city outskirts — have seized several hundreds of kilos of marijuana recently.
“With the city being chosen as a route to transport drugs, we have tightened the surveillance, particularly on the outskirts. Based on inputs and regular vehicle checking, we are able to bust many drug rackets,” said a senior official from Rachakonda. All the officials from various wings including law and order, Central Crime Station and Special Operations Teams are continuously on the job, the official added.
Police sources say that usually the places where marijuana is cultivated and where it is stored are located in different places and the dealers never deliver the stock directly to the buyers.
“They take the vehicles of the buyers deep into the forest to an undisclosed location, where the drug is packed into sachets as per requirement and loaded into the vehicles. It is brought out of the forest and parked at the same place where it was picked up. From there, the buyers transport it to other places,” said an official.
The drug load is packed with adhesive tapes and transported via Hyderabad with the help of small-time drug peddlers and drivers of cars, trucks and auto-trollies operating in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka States.
“They are often lured with huge money for delivering each consignment safely to the buyer to a particular location in Maharashtra and other places. For this, they are paid anywhere between Rs 20,000 to Rs 1 lakh depending on the consignment,” the official added.
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