Sometime in 2013, the Mumbai police decided it had to do something about Meow Meow. Mephedrone, known on the street as Meow Meow, was cheap...
Sometime in 2013, the Mumbai police decided it had to do something about Meow Meow. Mephedrone, known on the street as Meow Meow, was cheap and widely available, and the police were having a hard time keeping up. Possession of the drug had not been made illegal under the stringent Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, despite the Mumbai police making multiple representations to various Central agencies for the substance to be banned.
So, in 2013 then city police commissioner Rakesh Maria directed his force to start arresting pedlars of mephedrone under the next-best option: Section 328 of the IPC, “causing hurt using a poisonous substance”. Quite apart from the Mumbai police’s inability to correctly collect, label and present evidence – as borne out by the observations of district court judges in every single case – the basic problem was clearly the application of the wrong law. “You need to show intention to cause hurt. How hard is that to understand and how many times did I need to tell the police that? No effect,” one judge who had seen dozens of such cases said.
The Mumbai police knew this. “See, the hands of the police were tied. So they had to use...
