In 1973, the first case of ganja smuggling was detected in the Agency area of erstwhile Visakhapatnam district, which has now been made a part of the newly-created Alluri Sitaramaraju (ASR) district.
Back then, those arrested for smuggling or consumption of drugs would be charged under the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1930, which prescribed only meagre punishments for the offences relating to drugs. This continued until Parliament enacted the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act of 1985, which gave law enforcement agencies more teeth to tackle the swiftly growing menace of the drug trade across India.
In the years since, several mandals of the Agency, such as GK Veedhi, Pedabayalu, Paderu, Chintapalli, Koyyuru, and G. Madugula — all Maoist hotbeds — have grown to become a marijuana hub in the country, even outrunning the reputation of Chamba valley in Himachal Pradesh thanks to its prolific output of weed.
Over the years, crops such as millet and turmeric that were traditionally grown in the Agency mandals have given way to the much more profitable ganja crop, which is now being grown over thousands of acres.
The cultivation of the crop has reached such high levels that it became a matter of discussion in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) as well as the Home Ministries of several States. Coordination meetings between the police chiefs of several States affected by the ganja menace began to be held, and the focus shifted to stronger enforcement and destruction of ganja crops.
The Andhra Pradesh government later formed the Special Enforcement Bureau (SEB) to tackle the menace of ganja cultivation as well as distillation of illicit liquor. The strategies began yielding results, with police routinely intercepting ganja-laden trucks and confiscating large quantities of the contraband.
Smugglers change tack
After seeing that the crackdown on ganja smuggling was being scaled up by the police, smugglers began refining their methods to shift the contraband out of the district. For the first time in 2017, acting on a tip-off, police conducted a raid in an interior village called Alagam in G. Madugula mandal and seized 95 kg of ‘hashish oil’, commonly known as hash oil or ‘wax’, as it is called in the upcountry drug markets of metro cities.
While one kilogram of ganja or cannabis is sold for ₹7,500 to ₹10,000 in cities such as Hyderabad or Bengaluru, an equal amount of hash oil fetches around ₹1 lakh to ₹1.2 lakh in the same cities.
Hash oil is easier to smuggle. To earn ₹1 lakh by selling ganja, one needs to carry at least 15 kg of the product. The same can be earned through one kg of hash oil, and can be smuggled in a water bottle, said Superintendent of Police of ASR district J. Satish Kumar, who was earlier the joint director of SEB for erstwhile Visakhapatnam district.
Hash oil can be smuggled in small sachets, and can easily be concealed. The strong odour that comes with cannabis is also absent.
In the last two years, police have seized 500 kg of hash oil being smuggled out of the Araku valley.
Manufacturing
Hash oil is a concentrated form of ganja and is said to be at least four times more potent and stronger than traditional weed.
Preparation or extraction of hash oil from ganja is a simple process. S.V.V.N. Babji Rao of the SEB says that tribals have been trained by a few smugglers from Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the process of extracting hash oil.
All they need to do is to crush the dried leaves, flowers and stems of the marijuana plant in a rudimentary crushing machine, add some oil to extract the solvent and then heat it at a certain temperature to extract the oil. It could be in the form of oil or at times even in the form of wax.
