On 16 August 2026, an officer from Bangladesh’s Department of Narcotics Control (DNC) posed as a customer and ordered three bottles of “CBD oil” from Daraz, the country’s largest online shopping marketplace. A delivery rider carried the parcel to Topkhana Road in central Dhaka, where officers searched it and questioned him. The driver said he had no idea what he was carrying. With nothing tying him to the trade, officers let him go.
The chemist who bottled the oil, which tested positive for THC, was arrested at his flat in Badda. But the case filed that day also named Daraz’s managing director. The DNC’s Director General Hasan Maruf confirmed it was the first case under a new cyber provision that carries a death sentence.
That provision, the new Section 36A of the Bangladeshi 2018 Narcotics Control Act, punishes anyone who “directly or indirectly” uses a “cyberspace, digital device, website, social media, mobile application, online platform, electronic communication system or any other digital medium” to buy, sell, supply, offer, advertise, mediate or communicate about drugs. A companion power allows the DNC to ask the Bangladeshi telecoms regulator to block online content that encourages drug use, with no exemption for health information.
Bangladesh may be the first country and only in the world to impose capital punishment for talking about drugs online. Ajeng Larasati, Human Rights Lead at Harm Reduction International (HRI), said the organisation was not aware of another jurisdiction that imposes death for a drug offence “centred on communication through digital platforms.”
With no good definition of “communication”, it’s feared that healthcare workers, outreach staff, and harm reduction personnel could be executed for merely sharing health information in Bangladesh’s online spaces.
Expanded powers
Bangladesh’s Home Minister, Salahuddin Ahmed, placed the new Narcotics Control (Amendment) bill before parliament on 27 June. On 13 July, lawmakers passed it by voice vote, after rejecting public scrutiny and referral to committee.
The wording of the law purposefully casts a wide net. Its list of prohibited acts includes buying, selling and supplying, so people who use drugs arranging a purchase by message fall within it, even if they don’t actually end up purchasing drugs. Penalties run from hefty fines to any length of imprisonment up to death. Prosecutors no longer need to recover any drugs to convict. Unlike the 2018 Act, which tied death sentences to specific drug quantities such as 25 grams of heroin, 36A sets no threshold at all.
The law also creates a drug cybercrime branch and a digital forensics laboratory inside the DNC. It lets officers seize computers, servers and cloud storage, and it names the dark web and encrypted messaging explicitly as targets. The wider amendment also arms DNC officers with weapons, dog squads and lock-ups, and sets up prosecution branches in every district court.
Simultaneously, the law also creates a new court system; since its enactment, 22 narcotics tribunals across 10 districts have been set up to accelerate drug-related court proceedings. This includes three in Cox’s Bazar, the main entry point for methamphetamine from Myanmar. Wherever a narcotics tribunal sits, ordinary courts lose their jurisdiction over drug offences carrying five years or more. Pending cases must move across within 60 days, from a backlog the Home Minister puts at roughly 80,000 cases.
Reading the law, one clause stands out. Where an offence runs through an international or organised network, the text prescribes imprisonment, fine, or both, but does not mention death. This creates a bizarre situation where a lone drug purchaser faces death for their use, while those potentially working in international criminal operations do not.
Based on her reading of the new rules, Larasati said the missing threshold and the possibility of a death sentence without any drugs being recovered raised serious concerns about overcriminalisation and arbitrary enforcement.
Bangladesh has been down this road before. In 2018, as parliament classified methamphetamine pills (regionally known as ‘yaba’) a class A substance with the death penalty, security forces killed nearly 300 drug trafficking suspects, making an additional 25,000 arrests. That year, the country seized a record amount of 53 million yaba pills. At the time, officials claimed the haul and killings were proof of their campaign’s success; groups, including HRI and local organisation Ain O Salish Kendra, said the killings had little impact on the country’s drug trade.
The gagging of harm reduction
Asked about the impact of the new law on harm reduction, Larasati said it was “potentially devastating.”
Harm reduction in Bangladesh, as in the rest of the world, has always depended on reaching people where they are. CARE Bangladesh began needle and syringe exchange in Dhaka in 1998, working through outreach workers and drop-in centres. Funding cuts have since thinned that network out: a 2025 ethnographic study recorded drop-in centres in Dhaka falling from 17 to 11, and each outreach worker’s caseload rising from 40 to 72 people who inject drugs. The same study noted outreach workers were being stopped and questioned by police on the allegation that handing out needles enabled drug use.
Larasati said digital tools were particularly valuable in places like Bangladesh, where criminalisation blocks access to physical services. A law criminalising communication about drugs in such broad terms, she said, “risks real threat of criminalisation against outreach workers, peer educators, health professionals, researchers, journalists and community organisations.”
The amended law does not define “communicate” or “mediate”. Nor does it say whether “encouraging use” covers advice on safer injecting or overdose. Other states with similar policies have been much more explicit about their definitions. Singapore’s 2019 amendments criminalised giving people information on consuming drugs, but carved out legitimate education purposes. Singapore still executes people regularly for drug offences, yet it enshrines a public-health exception that Bangladesh’s legal text lacks.
Larasati placed Bangladesh’s new system in a wider family of “drug propaganda” laws. A 2025 regional survey by the Eurasian Harm Reduction Association found at least seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia had adopted or debated such measures. Uzbekistan introduced criminal liability for online drug propaganda in 2024, and Hungary’s 2025 constitutional amendment bans the “promotion” of drugs without defining what promotion means.
Russia went furthest earliest, blocking the website of Moscow’s only harm reduction group over methadone advocacy in 2012; the Andrey Rylkov Foundation took its site down years later after repeated narco-propaganda accusations.
Attaching the death penalty to that kind of conduct, Larasati said, takes the risk to a different level of gravity and sets a dangerous precedent.
New frontiers
Bangladesh’s DNC Director General Maruf believes the new law will energise police enforcement and act as a deterrent; former police chief Abdul Kaiyum backed Maruf’s enthusiasm, claiming that harsh action on “narcotics criminals” would prevent further crime downstream.
But there’s no evidence that the death penalty reduces drug use, and profound concerns remain that such a law would kill harm reduction programmes for those that sorely need them – such as those who inject drugs, who have had a worrying rise in HIV transmission rates in the past year. What’s worse is that, if “drug communication” and messaging intent is broadly interpreted, people communicating vital information about drugs have very little legal recourse. The delivery rider on Topkhana Road walked free because he could show he did not know what was in his parcel; but an outreach worker who texts a client about clean needles knows exactly what the message is about.
By early November, pending cases will have moved into the new drug tribunals. From then, we will understand whether a message about harm reduction counts as “communicating” about drugs – with potentially lethal consequences for those using drugs, and the workers trying to reach them.
“People should not face the ultimate and irreversible punishment simply for communicating about drugs,” Larasati said. “Especially when that communication may involve providing information that protects health and reduces harm.”
Bangladesh’s DNC did not respond to a request for comment on this article.