The crackdown on an illegal trade in prescription drugs in Tamil Nadu has reopened the murky world of e-pharmacies and online rackets.

Under the joint Indo-US initiative called Operation Cyber chase, the US Drug Enforcement Administration tipped off the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), resulting in busting of an online drug racket that has spread its tentacles to Coimbatore in western Tamil Nadu.

A year ago, the NCB, Kolkata, had cracked the Sanjay Kedia case, exposing a thriving multi-million dollar online racket of procuring psychotropic drugs from India and distributing them in the US. The NCB estimated that the monthly online transaction of Kedia’s company was a massive US $ 500,000.

Earlier, in 2005, the DEA had busted an even bigger e-trafficking ring involving an NRI, Akhil Bansal. The DEA picked up Akhil from his apartment in Philadelphia, US, while NCB officials arrested his father, Brij Bhushan Bansal, unearthing an online racket of prescription drugs worth US $ 20 million.

Last week, NCB sleuths swooped down on the branch office of a New York-based company in Peelamedupudur in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu’s textile hub, and took into custody the manager, D Ramakrishnan.

Simultaneously, in New York, the DEA arrested the company’s president, T Seethapathy, a 70-year-old native of Coimbatore, running the racket for about two years through the website www.abcmedics.com Ramakrishnan traded in drugs that come under Schedule I of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, prohibited from export.

The company did not have the necessary licence either to export the drugs, having registered with the RBI for trading in consumer items alone.

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