Surat’s Rs 43 Lakh Dark Web Raid Was Nine LSD Strips

Surat police valued nine LSD strips and 21.82 grams of hybrid cannabis at Rs 43,15,460 after raiding an Adajan flat in June 2024. The order had come from Bangkok on the dark web, they said, and the man they named was already gone.

Almost all of that rupee figure sat on the paper. The flower in the same parcel sat far under the ganja line that Indian law uses to separate a small hold from a trafficking case.

Nine LSD Strips and 21.82 Grams in Adajan

Officers from the Special Operations Group and the Prevention of Crime Branch went into a house in Krishnakunj Society, Adajan, on June 1, 2024. They were looking for Parth Mandirwala, a 30-year-old diamond broker. He was not there. A parcel was.

DCP Rajdeepsinh Nakum, who headed the Special Operations Group, described what they opened.

We raided the house of Mandirwala in Krishna Kunj society in Adajan area. We found a parcel in which the LSD was hidden. While checking the parcel, we found nine strips of LSD worth Rs 42.5 lakh along with 21.82 gram hybrid ganja worth Rs 65,000.

Rajdeepsinh Nakum, DCP, Special Operations Group, Surat Police

The police statement put the two finds together at Rs 43,15,460. Nakum’s split assigns Rs 42.5 lakh to the nine strips and Rs 65,000 to the 21.82 grams of hybrid ganja. The wire copy called the papers blotter papers; Nakum called them strips. Both describe the same nine pieces of dosed paper.

THE ADAJAN PARCEL

• The LSD: Nine strips, valued by Nakum at Rs 42.5 lakh.
• The flower: 21.82 grams of hybrid ganja, valued at Rs 65,000.
• The total: Rs 43,15,460 in the police statement.
• The wanted man: Parth Mandirwala, 30, diamond broker, booked under the NDPS Act and declared wanted.

Nakum said Mandirwala ordered through the dark web to hide the buys and sold through social media groups. Investigators told colleagues they were looking at international courier parcels sent under other names, cryptocurrency payments, and a pile of foreign chocolates in the flat that they linked to how the LSD had been packed. A police official said part of the consignment had already been sold, and that a user only needed a portion of a strip under the tongue.

Adajan police registered a case under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. “A case has been registered against the wanted accused in Adajan police station under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, and efforts are on to nab him,” the police said. Officers also said they were speaking to family members and trying to map who had taken the drugs. In September 2021, the Narcotics Control Bureau had already taken LSD off a Surat couple. No later public notice of Mandirwala’s arrest appeared after the 2024 raid.

The Ganja Table Would Have Called This Small

Indian sentencing in these cases turns on weight, not on the press-note rupee total. For cannabis flower that the statute calls ganja, the Department of Revenue still publishes the notified bands: ganja small quantity is 1 kg and commercial quantity is 20 kg. Possession, sale, and transport of cannabis sit in Section 20.

21.82 grams is 2.2 percent of that 1 kg small-quantity mark. On the ganja table, the Adajan flower is a small-quantity hold. It is not a 20 kg commercial load, and it is not even close to the 1 kg line that ends the lowest band.

NDPS THRESHOLDS AGAINST THE SURAT HAUL

The Department of Revenue lists small-quantity possession in the lowest penalty band, with rigorous imprisonment of up to six months or a fine of up to Rs 10,000, or both. Intermediate amounts, above small and below commercial, can bring up to 10 years and a fine of up to Rs 1 lakh. Commercial quantity starts at 10 to 20 years and a fine of Rs 1 to 2 lakh, and it pulls in the strict bail bar in Section 37. Those commercial figures are why a dark-web headline wants a commercial LSD case, not 22 grams of flower.

Why Nine Strips Became a Rs 42.5 Lakh Case

LSD is a psychotropic substance under Section 22, and the weight bands are tiny. The central government’s 2001 small and commercial quantity table, the notification High Courts cite for blotter cases, sets LSD small quantity at 0.002 grams (2 milligrams) and commercial quantity at 0.1 grams (100 milligrams). Cross 0.1 grams and the statute treats the hold as trafficking-scale, with the 10-to-20-year band in play.

Police never released a milligram weight for the nine strips. They released a price. Nakum’s Rs 42.5 lakh is about 98.5 percent of the Rs 43,15,460 statement total. The 21.82 grams of hybrid ganja, at Rs 65,000, is the rest. The raid became a Rs 43 lakh Bangkok case because of paper, not because of a sack of weed.

On May 30 and 31, 2024, two days before the Adajan search, the Karnataka High Court held that the blotter paper that carries LSD counts in the NDPS weight. Bombay High Court has taken the same combined-weight view. A few squares of card, once the paper is counted, can pass 0.1 grams even when the actual drug is measured in micrograms. That is the legal mechanic behind a nine-strip case that reads like a warehouse bust.

Nakum also pointed at Surat’s party circuit. Police said LSD had a market among “high-end people” and “luxury parties,” and that they were trying to see how far it had moved. They did not name buyers. They did not publish lab weights. They published nine strips, Rs 42.5 lakh, and a wanted diamond broker.

Bangkok Flower Moves by Parcel and by Suitcase

The Adajan parcel was a small, early copy of a supply line that later showed up in airport halls. DRI, in a September 16, 2025 note on Operation Weed Out, said attempts to move hydroponic weed from Thailand into India through airports had risen sharply over the previous year. The product is the same family of indoor, high-grade flower that Surat police labelled hybrid ganja, now seized as packed kilos in luggage rather than as 21.82 grams in a flat.

DRI’S BANGKOK HYDROPONIC HAULS

1. August 20 and 21, 2025: DRI seizes 72.024 kg of hydroponic weed, puts the value around Rs 72 crore, takes Rs 1.02 crore in alleged proceeds, and arrests five people, including financiers and a person it called a mastermind.
2. August 26 to September 12, 2025: Officers take 61.67 kg of hydroponic weed off Bangkok routes in Jaipur, Lucknow, and Kolkata.
3. September 13 and 14, 2025: Two Indian passengers arriving from Bangkok are stopped at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport with 39 packets weighing 39.2 kg; three people are arrested, including the intended recipient.
4. Same operation window: A further 7.8 kg (gross) moving from Bangkok to Mumbai brings two more passenger arrests. DRI totals those last three hauls at 108.67 kg of hydroponic weed in less than 20 days.

That 108.67 kg figure does not include the 72.024 kg taken on August 20 and 21, 2025. The Adajan flower, 21.82 grams, is a rounding error beside either number. Delhi airport customs, on June 3, 2026, said it pulled 6.020 kg of hydroponic weed off Thai Airways flight TG-315 from Bangkok after a passenger walked the green channel, and put the market value around Rs 2.10 crore. The concealment methods keep repeating: vacuum packs, false bag bottoms, and, in more than one Bangkok-route case, chocolate packaging around the load, the same cue Surat officers flagged in Mandirwala’s flat.

Courier LSD Did Not Stop in Surat

The blotter half of the Adajan story also scaled. On July 31, 2026, the Narcotics Control Bureau said a week-long operation by its Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Kochi units had broken a pan-India LSD ring that used express courier as cover. The probe started with blotters in Chennai and ran backward to parcels leaving Pune.

WHAT NCB TOOK FROM THE 2026 COURIER RING

• The blotters: 2,796 LSD blots seized nationwide, with the bureau’s own case summary putting the set at about Rs 1 crore; 225 of them were bound for Kodaikanal.
• The flower: 166 grams of a greenish substance suspected to be hydroponic ganja, still a long way under the 1 kg ganja small-quantity line.
• The other drugs: 113 Nitrazepam tablets weighing 59.89 grams, plus Rs 70,000 in cash treated as suspected proceeds.
• The method: At least 14 parcels from April 2026, darknet vendor accounts, and cryptocurrency transfers the bureau said it was still tracing.

Four people were arrested, among them a doctor and an MBBS student from Tamil Nadu, according to the bureau’s release. A key accused was stopped while packing consignments for Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh. Two people said to be running guest houses in Kodaikanal were listed as absconding. The Surat raid in 2024 already had the same three parts: dark web, courier, and a wanted man who was not in the room when the door went in.

What Hybrid Ganja Means Under Indian Law

Surat police used “hybrid ganja” and “hybrid cannabis” for the 21.82 grams. DRI and customs later used “hydroponic weed” and “hydroponic ganja” for the airport kilos. Both labels point at indoor, imported flower that officers treat as stronger and more expensive than field-grown Indian ganja, and both still go onto the ganja row of the NDPS table unless the lab calls the material resin or a concentrated extract.

That row is unforgiving in the other direction. Commercial quantity for ganja begins at 20 kg of flower. Press the same plant into charas or hashish and the commercial line drops to 1 kg. Reduce it to a THC extract and the bands shrink again. The Adajan hold was flower. Under the ganja schedule it stays small quantity, whatever the dark-web invoice said and whatever Rs 65,000 implies as a per-gram street guess.

LSD does not get that slack. Commercial quantity is 0.1 grams, blotter paper can be counted, and nine strips can be charged as a trafficking case before anyone weighs a bud. The irony of the Surat raid is not that police invented a Bangkok link. The irony is that the statute they used barely notices 21.82 grams of hybrid flower and then puts a multi-lakh number on nine pieces of paper in the same box.

Gujarat Is Back on the Thailand Route

On September 20, 2026, Telangana’s EAGLE Force said it had opened an international hydroponic ganja file on Thailand-to-India routes, identified around 96 people, and traced 60 transporters in Maharashtra and Gujarat, then served notices under Section 67 of the NDPS Act. Gujarat is the state where the Adajan parcel was sitting in 2024.

EAGLE Force TG uncovers international Hydroponic Ganja trafficking network linked to Thailand–India supply routes. Around 96 persons identified,with 60 transporters in Maharashtra & Gujarat traced & served notices u/s 67 NDPS Act & Investigation continues to trace the network. pic.twitter.com/CbtCl96Vh6

— EAGLE FORCE TELANGANA (@EAGLE_TELANGANA) September 20, 2026

The 2024 raid did not empty that channel. It recorded the small-end version: a diamond broker, a dark-web order, a courier box, nine LSD strips priced at Rs 42.5 lakh, and 21.82 grams of hybrid ganja that the ganja table would have called small. The larger loads moved into suitcases and interstate parcels. The wanted man from Krishnakunj Society was never produced in a public follow-up, and the paper in his parcel is still the thing that made the number huge.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a police seizure and of published NDPS quantity rules. It is for information only and is not legal advice, medical advice, or a guide to obtaining, possessing, or using controlled substances. Anyone facing an NDPS inquiry, or anyone who needs advice on cannabis, hemp, or drug law in India, should consult a qualified criminal lawyer licensed in the relevant state, and should not treat police valuations or quantity examples here as a prediction of any case outcome. Weights, rupee figures, and wanted statuses are those given by the cited police, DRI, customs, NCB, and revenue sources on the dates named, and later lab reports, chargesheets, or court orders can change them.