Mauritius’ latest National Drug Control Master Plan for 2026–2030 (NDCMP), published in April by Prime Minister Dr Navinchandra Ramgoolam, is a hopeful and genuinely ambitious plan by any international standard. Harm reduction is referenced throughout with policies including naloxone distribution, take-home methadone, and the opportunity for people caught with drugs for personal use to enter rehabilitation rather than face prosecution.
“It includes all of the necessary ideas, formulated in an interesting way,” said Nathalie Rose, a Mauritian independent drug policy advisor.
But behind the rhetoric lies a harm reduction infrastructure under serious stress: overcrowded dispensing clinics, collapsing international funding, an under-treated hepatitis C epidemic, and a legal framework that still criminalises the very people the health system is trying to reach.
In 2006, in response to an escalating HIV epidemic driven by drug injecting, Mauritius adopted a series of reforms aimed at mainstreaming a harm reduction approach, including introducing opioid agonist therapy and scaling needle and syringe programs. The results were significant, putting the country on the map as an example of harm reduction success.
Now, as Mauritius attempts to consolidate two decades of hard-won progress, the plan’s ambitions and its realities hang in the balance.
Promises and priorities
Mauritius’s plan is split into four pillars: 1. Drug Supply Reduction, 2. Drug Demand Reduction, 3. Health and Wellbeing, and 4. Coordinated Response.
Pillar three contains the plan’s most substantive harm reduction commitments, explicitly calling for scaling of methadone distribution, increasing take-home doses, expanding naloxone access through NGO and peer-based networks, and ensuring harm reduction services reach prison settings.
“The plan deeply discusses indicators that measure health and safety improvements for communities, and they seem to be really grounded in harm reduction principles,” Rose told TalkingDrugs. “For example, we’re talking about a decrease in incarceration rates for people who use drugs, a decrease in the number of overdoses, etc.”
A key improvement is the setting out of standards for rehabilitation centres, according to Rose. Private rehab facilities “burst up like mushrooms” under Mauritius’ last government, she explained, but had few standards governing them. This led to abuse, which she hoped would now be rectified given the new guidelines.
The plan also aims to improve employment opportunities for people who use drugs, promoting reskilling programs for people undergoing treatment for addiction.
“It’s a way of looking at health and wellbeing regarding drug use with a harm reduction lens, very unusual and interesting,” Rose remarked.
But there are gaps. Rose highlighted the lack of medical cannabis reform or a master plan for how drug panels will be implemented as well as limited gender mainstreaming and no mention of industrial help. At the same time, safe consumption facilities, which already operate in other parts of Africa, are notably absent.
The cannabis question
A complementary paper appended to the plan called explicitly for a “critical reassessment” of cannabis policy. That reassessment is already underway, a process which Rose is a part of.
“The government has convened a technical working group with a mandate to assess the different policy possibilities. We’re looking at: 1. Depenalisation 2. Decriminalisation and, 3. Regulated markets.”
The impetus behind this working group is partially the rise in synthetic cannabis and concern about its potential harms. Mauritius is a country with some of the most expensive cannabis in the world, according to Rose, which can cost as much as £50 per gram. This expense is causing some users to switch to synthetic cannabis, a trend that the review hopes to reverse.
At present, the results of the working group are confidential. But public consultations have been held, and the group is due to report to the government in July. Rose was keen to emphasise that whatever the process ends up recommending, the government will have the final say on any reforms.
“We don’t want to give false hope,” she said, “any reform will ultimately be a political decision.”
The group is looking at cannabis policy across the board, including access to medical cannabis and industrial hemp. Other African nations are trialling hemp production and cannabis reform, though these projects have sometimes been criticised for not focusing benefits on their home communities. The hope is that Mauritius won’t make the same mistake.
“I think it’s important that as things change, we maintain our national interest,” Rose said. “We don’t want to create industries that won’t benefit the country and the community.”
Footing the bill
Though great in principle, the key concern for the new plan will be implementation, according to Rose. Here, funding is one of the most acute structural problems. The NDCMP proposes that harm reduction will be financed through government budget allocations, the National Social Inclusion Foundation (NSIF), and the private sector. Though the plan has been budgeted, the funding commitment of each national partner and of each strategic pillar is not clearly specified.
Recently, Mauritius has already been experiencing an acute funding crisis. Global Fund contributions for programmes targeting people who use drugs in Mauritius fell to just $5,710 in the 2024–2026 cycle, down from $2.2m in 2021–2023. Mauritius’s upper-middle-income classification has made it ineligible for substantive grants.
South African harm reduction organisations face an analogous funding cliff, as international HIV funding shrinks globally under pressure from US aid cuts and donor retreat. In both countries, the lesson is the same: harm reduction infrastructure built with international donor support is extremely vulnerable.
That said, Mauritius is better positioned than many peers. The government already funds 80% of all domestic HIV programming for people who inject drugs and their partners, contributing around $228,000 in 2023, a sustained domestic commitment that has sheltered the country from the worst of donor funding cuts.
Shifting currents
The new plan comes at a tense moment for Mauritius. Across the world’s island nations, drug traffickers are exploiting new routes as security in consumer nations tightens. Small islands are becoming transit hubs, the trend supercharged by foreign investment and the opening of megaports, according to Ruggero Scaturro, senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.
Mauritius sits in the western Indian Ocean at the confluence of shipping routes connecting southern Africa, South Asia and East Asia. Its free port, extensive air network and status as an upper middle income financial centre have made it, in the plan’s own words, a prime target for drug trafficking networks. Synthetic cannabinoids — known locally as chimique — were first detected in 2013. The ENACT Organised Crime Index now ranks Mauritius first in the synthetic drug trade within southern Africa and in the top ten on the continent.
“When you’re opening your borders to foreign investments and open ports, this can be great and bring profit to communities,” Scaturro told TalkingDrugs. “But it has to be clear that this might also bring unexpected outcomes as traffickers exploit the new infrastructure.”
Fortunately, Mauritius recognises the problem. The NDCMP’s first pillar aims to disrupt trafficking networks via enhanced port and border security, financial intelligence and regional cooperation with nearby nations. These are exactly the kind of measures that Scaturro recommends, but he suggests that more is also needed.
“You need drug checking, communication, and information sharing within civil society. You need infrastructure to be resistant to trafficking from the ground up; security by design,”
In 2006, it became Africa’s first nation to legislate needle exchange and methadone maintenance. Twenty years later, Mauritius remains an outlier in Africa for the enshrining of harm reduction in its drug policy. The new master plan shows that there is hope to sustain the legacy of evidence-based, progressive laws around the use of drugs. Political will is the key question, according to Rose, as these decisions are ultimately always made by politicians.
“We will have to see to what extent all of these things are possible,” she said. “Paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight.”
