Powerful painkillers fuel West Africa addiction crisis – Report

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Indian pharmaceutical firms are exporting millions of dollars’ worth of powerful opioids to west Africa despite a promised crackdown, an AFP investigation found on Thursday, with officials saying they are driving a deadly drugs epidemic across the region.

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AFP was able to match high-strength tapentadol tablets seized in at least four west African countries with Indian export records through their makers’ licence numbers.

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Researchers say the pills are now being added to the ferociously addictive “zombie drug” kush, which has been declared a national emergency in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

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The tapentadol twist on kush is “very alarming”, Ansu Konneh, the director of mental health at Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Social Welfare told AFP. Bodies were being picked up from “the streets, markets and slums on a daily basis”, he said.

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More than 400 corpses were collected in the capital Freetown alone in three months, he added. Konneh said 90 percent of those admitted to the country’s few official rehab centres have smoked kush mixed with tapentadol or other powerful opioids like nitazenes.

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New Delhi declared a “zero-tolerance” crackdown on illegal drug trading in February 2025, banning export of tablets that mixed tapentadol with the muscle relaxant carisoprodol after a BBC investigation exposed the damage they were doing in Ghana.

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India’s drug regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), later said it was withdrawing all export clearances for “combinations of tapentadol… which are not approved by an importing country”.

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But the main trade was always in pure tapentadol tablets, researchers said. Shipment records reviewed by AFP show that millions of dollars’ worth of the high-strength pills are still being exported from India to west Africa every month.

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AFP was able to track the pills through their makers’ licence numbers, using commercial shipment data, government seizure records, interviews and documents obtained under India’s Right to Information transparency law.

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Tapentadol pills are increasingly used as a performance-enhancing drug to get people through tough, physically demanding jobs. Packaged and marketed as a medicine, they have trapped spiralling numbers of consumers into a spiral of addiction.

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Researchers say tapentadol has now “replaced or supplemented” the more widely known opioid tramadol in many west African countries.

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Tapentadol is often sold on the streets of the region as tramadol, but it is two to three times stronger, experts say.

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The CDSCO — which is responsible for issuing export clearances — told AFP it had “no record” of issuing them for consignments of 225 and 250mg tapentadol. It did not respond to follow-up queries.

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AFP

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