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Context

• The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrested a Bolivian woman from Mumbai airport for allegedly carrying black cocaine Drug.

What is Black Cocaine?

• “Black cocaine”, a rare drug, is a mixture of regular cocaine and other chemicals of administrated quantity. In a bid to ensure that sniffer dogs used at airports do not detect cocaine, it is being used by drug peddlers coming to India from South American countries.
• It neutralises the smell of cocaine so that it can pass through checkpoints easily.
• Black cocaine is a mixture of regular cocaine base with various substances to camouflage typical appearance (e.g. charcoal), to interfere with colour-based drug tests (cobalt salts form deep red complexes in solution), to make the mixture undetectable by drug-sniffing dogs as activated carbon may sufficiently absorb trace odours.
• The pure cocaine base is then recovered from the mixture by extraction using common organic solvents such as methylene chloride or acetone. A second process is required to convert the cocaine base into powdered cocaine hydrochloride.

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/what-is-black-cocaine-ncb-mumbai-8181863/

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