Uniform laws, procedures needed across globe to fight narcotics: Amit Shah

📌 Summary:

• Home Minister Amit Shah, delivering the R N Kao Memorial Lecture-2026 (annual R&AW event in memory of its founder Rameshwar Nath Kao), called for a unified global response to narcotics trafficking and set a national goal of a "Drug-free India by 2047"

• Shah framed narcotics as a "borderless threat" demanding collective responsibility — urged greater international coordination, shared legal frameworks and real-time intelligence-sharing to detain traffickers and prevent the rise of "narco states"

• Reiterated India's zero-tolerance policy: "not one gram of narcotics should be allowed to enter India nor used as a transit route"

• Linked narcotics to terror finance and parallel economy: "Drug money fuels terrorism, criminal networks and a parallel economy" — warned of growing threat from synthetic narcotics, online sales via dark-web platforms and crypto-based payments

• Highlighted institutional response: Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) elevated as nodal agency; record seizures and dismantling of synthetic drug labs in recent years; coordination with state anti-narcotics task forces

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 — internal security; nexus of narcotics, terror finance, money laundering; GS2 — international cooperation; treaty obligations (UN Conventions on drugs); GS4 — ethics in policy framing (drug-free goal vs harm-reduction approaches).

📝 Prelims Facts:

• NCB (Narcotics Control Bureau): India's apex agency for drug law enforcement, under Ministry of Home Affairs; established 1986 under the NDPS Act
• NDPS Act, 1985 — primary law governing narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances in India
• R N Kao: founder of R&AW (Research and Analysis Wing) in 1968, India's external intelligence agency under the Cabinet Secretariat

🔑 Key Term: Narco State — a country where the political/economic system has been substantially co-opted or weakened by the illegal narcotics trade, with traffickers exerting de-facto control over institutions.