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.
