The NCB on 17 March uncovered a huge illegal drug trafficking racket that seized around 55,000 tablets of a popular sedative, leading to the arrest of 4 people.

Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has busted an illegal pharma drugs trafficking racket with the arrest of four persons and seized over 55,000 tablets of Zolpidem, abused as drugs, from their possession, the agency said today. Zolpidem, a sedative medicine, is used to treat sleep disorders and its abuse as narcotic drugs can lead to hallucinations and other side effects.

The central anti-narcotics agency said the alleged racket, where medicines are abused as drugs, was being run using courier services and it brought to the fore "a new modus operandi for trafficking of pharmaceutical drugs through call centres." The agency, in a statement, said that four accused P Rana, P Bisht, R C Singh and K K Tiwary "acted as drug traffickers and obtained contact numbers of illegal buyers/sellers of phrama drugs from a legal platform available on the internet."

Once the contact numbers are received, it said, they form a closed internet group and then all the dealings were done mostly through Skype messenger or other voice over internet protocol (VoIP) calling apps (applications). The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) said it has seized a total of 55,875 Zolpidem tablets as part of an intelligence-based operation spanning from Ghaziabad, Lucknow and Roorkee to foreign shores including the US.

"Further interrogations of the four accused revealed that the said consignment was being sent to Varanasi for further dispatch to foreign destinations where there is a huge demand of such pharmaceutical drugs," the agency said. The four have been arrested under provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, it said.