Season 2, Episode 5:
Shashikala "Baby" Patankar - The Meow Meow Queen

Summary: Here at LWH we love a good rags to riches tale - who doesn’t? Episode 5 follows one such story about Baby Patankar , who went from lowly Milkmaid to the leader of one of Mumbai’s largest drug rings. So, maybe not your typical…or legal, fairy tail, but definitely an interesting one. Join us, as we tell the tale of the notorious Meow Meow Queen.

Research Sources:

• https://openthemagazine.com/features/india/the-drug-lady-of-mumbai/
• https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai/mumbai-s-baby-patankar-the-queen-of-a-flourishing-drug-empire/story-6I5JEw8modJ1g2prIqXuBJ.html
• https://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-shashikala-ramesh-patankar-mumbai-s-lady-drug-dealer-worth-over-rs-100-crore-2069454
• https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/baby-patankar-drug-case-mumbai-124-kg-of-mephedrone-makes-way-for-20-gm-of-charas-in-chargesheet-5849453/
• https://indianexpress.com/article/india/mumbai-cops-come-up-empty-against-drug-peddler-baby-patankar-again-4852044/
• https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/babys-days-out-5258342/
• https://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-3003097/Maharashtra-Police-launch-massive-manhunt-female-drug-dealer-known-Baby.html
• https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/the-sunday-story-meow-meow-and-baby/

Audio Credits:

Intro/Outro: Possessed Doll - Purple Planet Music https://www.purple-planet.com/

Background/Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/

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Audio Credits:

Intro/Outro: Possessed Doll - Purple Planet Music https://www.purple-planet.com/

Background/Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Hello Lawless Listeners! Welcome to Framing the Narrative, a Lawless subseries devoted to exploring the historical backdrop for our curvaceous criminals.

This week we’ll be learning about India’s drug trade in the 80’s and 90’s, so throw away your D.A.R.E. shirts and say YES to… knowledge? 

Mephedrone, often known as Meow Meow or White Magic, is a synthetically created amphetamine stimulant that has effects comparable to MDMA and cocaine. For those of you who don’t know about cocaine, it was suuuper big back in the day – just watch American Psycho and you’ll get it. ANYWAY, It has significant emotional and social consequences. MCAT, drone, party drug, and other names have been given to the meow-meow drug. It seems to be a very fine white powder, off-white, or yellowish in appearance (don’t snort the yellow coke). It has a metallic, unpleasant flavor, likened to exhaust fumes by some people (if getting high required me to place my mouth on an exhaust pipe, I def wouldn’t do it). The substance can be swallowed, injected, or snorted and comes in the shape of tablets, capsules, or a white powder. Most people prefer to take their medication via snorting them fine lines.

Other famed party drugs from India’s trade include brown sugar – a low-grade form of synthetic heroin that comes from the morphine found in poppy seeds – and Hashish, also known a marijuana. These three heavy hitters dominated India’s drug trade for over three decades – Can you guess the name of our next curvaceous criminal? Join us next time when we uncover the full story!

Hello Lawless listeners! We’ve got some changes coming to our program that we’d like to announce, but first we’d like to say THANK YOU – to our families, our friends, and you, our amazing listeners. We truly appreciate every one of you for downloading our releases and sharing our little project with your peers. Your continued interest in our show has kept us going. So thank you for being YOU! 

While we enjoy making these episodes, doing a podcast can be taxing on our team, especially since this is not our full-time job. With this in mind, we have decided to restructure the show. We’re doing away with our seasonal schedule and will be releasing episodes at varying intervals, ideally once a month. This will give our researchers, script writers, and producers more time to create and develop our episodes! However, we here at Lawless won’t be going radio silent – instead, our team will be working on developing additional projects and expanding into other platforms! In the next month, we’ll be releasing our very own website! Woohoo! After that, we’ll be getting our YouTube up and running, and in the meantime, you can join our Archivist on Twitch when he is researching and writing episodes. You can also find us on TikTok and watch as our hosts struggle to figure it out. All joking aside, we’re excited to start this next leg of our journey, and thank you for sticking with us. [If we want to provide examples] Annie is learning TikTok, and will be spearheading a new series of short form stories. Our archivist has started another series, called Framing the Narrative, a short historical preview for our curvaceous criminals.