Indian pharma fuels Africa's 'zombie drug' and opioid crisis despite crackdown

They come in blister packs of 10 like any normal painkiller and you can buy them easily in roadside kiosks and street pharmacies across west Africa. Millions of tapentadol tablets from India are helping drive a deadly opioid epidemic ravaging the region, with officials and researchers telling AFP that they are also being added to the “zombie drug” kush. The cheap pills are so strong that no regulatory authority in the world has approved them. Yet an AFP investigation found Indian pharmaceutical firms were flooding west Africa with the pills despite New Delhi vowing to crack down on the trade. Some shipments were even labelled “Harmless Medicines for Human Consumption”. Customs records show millions of dollars’ worth of the high-strength synthetic opioid being shipped from India every month to Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana, where even low doses of the drug are not permitted. With opioids now heavily regulated in wealthier nations after being linked to one million deaths in the United States alone, some manufacturers in India — the world’s biggest producer of generic drugs — are pushing hard into Africa. And in a frightening development, tapentadol is now being added to the “zombie drug” kush, health chiefs and researchers told AFP. Kush, infamous for the speed with which it hollows out its victims, has already been declared a national emergency in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bodies on the streets The tapentadol twist on the ferociously addictive synthetic cocktail is “very alarming”, Ansu Konneh, director of mental health at Sierra Leone’s social welfare ministry told AFP. Bodies are being picked up from “the streets, markets and slums on a daily basis”, he said — with more than 400 corpses collected over three months in the capital Freetown alone. “They grind and mix it with kush,” Freetown-based public health researcher Ronald Abu Bangura told AFP, with tapentadol now “being misused all over the place”. Members of the Transnational Organised Crime Unit (TOCU), a sp