Srinagar, Nov 21: The High Court has ruled that examining a single bottle of cough syrup cannot establish that all seized bottles contained identical substances, and on this basis granted bail to an accused charged with carrying a commercial quantity of drugs.
Justice Sanjay Dhar approved the bail application after noting that the seizure memo did not record batch numbers or composition details for the recovered bottles. The Court held that without such information, one tested bottle cannot be treated as representative of the entire seizure.
The case pertains to the alleged recovery of several bottles of a pharmaceutical syrup suspected to contain Codeine. Investigators had sent only one bottle to the Forensic Science Laboratory, which confirmed the presence of the narcotic ingredient. The remaining bottles were not tested. The defence argued that, without proof that all bottles held the same preparation, the conditions under Section 37 of the NDPS Act for denying bail could not be invoked.
The prosecution maintained that all bottles carried the same formulation, claiming that a single tested bottle was sufficient to represent the entire lot. The Court rejected this view, stating that representative sampling is permissible only when the bottles belong to the same batch or have clear identifiers showing uniformity. In this case, no such details were provided.
The Court also observed that the legal precedent cited by the prosecution was not applicable, as there was no evidence demonstrating identical contents across the seized bottles.
Noting that several important witnesses had already been examined and that further detention was not necessary for the trial, the Court held that the prosecution had failed to establish possession of a commercial quantity.
Finding reasonable grounds to believe the accused was not guilty of the commercial-quantity charge, the High Court granted bail with conditions.
