Oxytocin misuse driving black market dairy economy in India

Oxytocin, commonly known as the ‘love-hormone’ brings forth visuals of warmth, comfort, and the sacred relationship between a mother and her child. The hormone is naturally released in the brain during childbirth and drives labor by stimulating uterine contractions, triggering the maternal-child bond.

The very same drug is rampantly weaponised in the Indian dairy sector, to exploit the mother-child bond and drive milk let down. Naturally produced in humans and cattle alike, as a messenger of bonding and trust – in the black-market dairy economy, this soft messenger has been used as a tool to drive brute force and industrial coercion.

What Oxytocin is meant to do – Nature’s Blueprint for Bonding
Oxytocin is produced in the brain’s hypothalamus, the human body’s master control center, responsible for regulating hormone production and emotional responses. Release of Oxytocin, particularly at times of birth, stimulates uterine contractions, triggering the maternal-child bond. It promotes positive feelings and increases relaxation, trust and overall psychological stability.

In cattle, milk is produced only after giving birth to calves. The calf’s suckling on the cattle’s udder activates the sensory signals, following which Oxytocin is released. The hormone then travels through the bloodstream and causes the natural let down of milk. The release of this hormone to facilitate milk let-down is the body’s natural response – a carefully evolved biological dialogue between mother and child.

Oxytocin Usage as a form of Biological Borrowing
While cattle exclusively produce milk for calves after giving birth to them, the dairy economy commercialises this milk for human consumption. The mother cattle firmly withholds her milk, refusing to let it down in absence of her calf.

Cattle are commonly injected with synthetic Oxytocin, immediately prior to milking. The intent here is squarely to commercially extract the milk for human consumption – by creating painful contractions which force let down. Oxytocin functions like a master key to the reproductive system. Under natural conditions, the key is used sparingly and for specific biological purposes. In dairies, that key is repeatedly turned for commercial convenience.

The implications of such routine, non-therapeutic Oxytocin use are well-documented. One of the chief concerns is Mastitis – painful inflammation of the cattles’ udder, leading to weakening of the milk-blood barrier and leaking of blood toxins into milk consumed by human beings. It also causes infertility, uterine complications and reproductive exhaustion – leading to cattle becoming “unproductive” and discarded from production systems. Oxytocin misuse is therefore nothing short of biological borrowing – crudely extracting tomorrow’s capacity for today’s productivity, and in every single instance, the cost is paid by the cattle.

The syndicates behind the vial

The Oxytocin administered by dairy operators is of a spurious variety, lacking a label disclosing any manufacturer, expiry date or composition. Similar spurious formulations of the hormone fuel other syndicates, notorious for criminal transgressions.

Over the years, crack down by the police and the regulators has uncovered illicit Oxytocin trade and use networks. For instance, it is misused for artificially ripening and increasing the size of vegetable and fruit produce. Importantly, investigations have also revealed that Oxytocin is also used to accelerate puberty in girl-children sold into the human trafficking networks.

A crime with a known address

The illegal use of Oxytocin in dairies is one of the few places where the black market operates under the streetlight rather than in the shadows. The vial of Oxytocin sitting in brazenly plain sight at your neighbourhood dairy is but the tip at the surface of an underground drug trade economy. Beneath the surface thus lies covertly operating syndicates.

Addressing Oxytocin usage in cattle is therefore the dangling loose thread of a much larger underground network. Pulling on that thread could unravel far more than a single offence.

The usage of Oxytocin to induce milk let down in cattle is in fact a criminal offence. The law provides that the police can arrest a suspect without a warrant in such cases. Yet its use remains rampant. Unlike many offences that require extensive investigation to identify where, when and how they occur, Oxytocin misuse in dairies typically follows a predictable pattern. It occurs at known locations, at known times, and through a known method.

Oxytocin usage in dairies is relatively easy to identify and act against, and any action in this regard would have a domino effect. It would enable authorities to crack down on the very same suppliers who exploit female reproductive systems of humans and cattle alike. Resolving the Oxytocin crisis in our country would therefore carry dual benefits – dismantling both the cattle-cruelty network and the wider criminal economy sustained by illicit drug trade.

The contrast is striking. India rightly devotes significant resources to tackling narcotics and steroid abuse through specialised enforcement mechanisms. Yet one of the country’s most normalised illegal drug networks continues to operate openly through dairies in plain sight.

This is the cost of what we refuse to see behind a glass of milk. The cruelty in dairy is hidden not because it is invisible, but because it has become all too ordinary. The routine use of Oxytocin reflects a wider acceptance of biological processes of vulnerable groups being manipulated for yield and profit.

Few illegal drug markets operate as openly as the Oxytocin trade. The question is no longer whether authorities know it exists; the question is why we ignore Oxytocin used openly in dairies while focusing exclusively on downstream trafficking concerns? This collective decision to look the other way is akin to knowing the exact branch, date, time and participants of a planned bank robbery, yet choosing to search randomly for stolen money elsewhere in the city.

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