Two college students were arrested at a nightclub on Wednesday night for alleged possession of banned “ecstasy” tablets worth around Rs 25 lakh on the grey market, police said.
“One of the students is 21 and a resident of Lake Town, the other is 20 and is from New Town. The two have been booked under the Narcotic Drugs Psychotropic Substances Act,” said an officer of the special task force of Kolkata police.
“Both are students of two popular colleges in south Kolkata. We had specific information about trafficking of contraband drugs at a nightclub.”
Sources said the club was raided by plainclothesmen.
“One of the two students was handing a polythene packet containing the contraband weighing around 245g to the other when the cops nabbed them. The approximate value of the contraband is Rs 25 lakh,” the officer said.
“The biggest challenge in such cases is that we cannot arrest the suspect till he or she is found to be in possession of a drug. In this case we caught them with a drug. They could not provide any satisfactory explanation about the source of the drug.”
The officer said it seems the student who was being handed the packet would have supplied the drug to others.
STF officers said they were investigating the source of the drug and how it reached the students.
This is not the first time that students have been caught in possession of psychotropic substances in Kolkata.
“Drug peddlers target students and lure them into addiction. We have several case studies where people who started taking drugs at an early age were forced to become peddlers just to sustain their addiction,” said a senior officer at Lalbazar.