Phensedyl and other cough syrups are illegally brought into the State with forged documents and at times are hidden under other commodities like in trucks and buses. Once inside, they find their way to Bangladesh, with which Tripura shares two thirds of its border. The drug is generally sent in its original packaging. Since liquor is banned in Bangladesh, the drug became a popular alternative for alcohol. 

 In every meeting between BSF and Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) , the Bangladeshis have raised serious objections to the rampant smuggling of phensydyl from India . Dhaka is justified in feeling that this is a threat for their youth. One of my good friend and junion colleague. Anirban Roy once exposed the phensydyl racket in the Northeast when he was a Special Correspondent for Hindustan Times. His Delhi bosses first praised him to the sky for wonderful investigative journalism but a week later admonished him . Roy was puzzled at this sudden change of attitude. Later he found that the owners of Nicholas Piramal are personal friends of the owners of Hindustan Times who had pulled up the editors for running Roy's story in serialised form for a few days. Roy is now a senior regional advisor for Northeast with the British high commission, gainfully employed but no longer in media, where he had created much impact.

It is not difficult to see how such high connections can muzzle reporting on serious non-traditional threats to human security. We have seen in neighbouring Myanmar how insurgents and the army both get into peddling drugs . In Tripura, there is a huge business lobby (better call them smugglers lobby) that has grown up around phensydyl smuggling. They have political patrons of all hues backing them. The state government has failed to bring these criminals to justice and impose a firm Drug Control policy. So has the Centre . The BSF and Customs has often seized huge consignments of phensydyl but the feeling is the seizures are just the tip of the iceberg. Both the Centre and the state government have to go after the producers in a big way to stop trafficking of this deadly syrup.