In October 2025, West African authorities celebrated the results of Operation Harmattan, a coordinated enforcement effort across seven countries conducted under the Airport Communication Project, a UN-backed, EU-funded drug-interception programme. The operation led to 13 arrests and the seizure of fentanyl, tramadol, cannabis, cocaine, tobacco and cash, and was widely praised as dealing a blow to synthetic drug trafficking in the region.
Yet behind the congratulatory press releases, a more troubling picture is emerging. While enforcement agencies focus on interdiction at airports and postal facilities, parts of West Africa are grappling with a rapidly evolving synthetic drug crisis—one shaped not only by trafficking routes, but by shifts in global pharmaceutical regulation that have altered supply chains in dangerous and often unforeseen ways.
“Through our work in West Africa, we kept hearing about kush, but there was a lot of hearsay and myth with very little evidence,” Lucia Bird, director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s (GI-TOC) Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa, said in a 2025 report.
The Tramadol pipeline
For more than a decade, For more than a decade, illicit tramadol has played a central role in West Africa’s non‑medical opioid markets, a phenomenon driven not only by recreational use but also by chronic shortages of legally prescribed opioids for pain management and palliative care in the region, where medical access to essential opioid medications remains among the lowest in the world. International drug monitoring bodies have repeatedly documented the region as the global epicentre of tramadol trafficking, with close to 90% of all tramadol seizures worldwide reported in West and Central Africa, according to UNODC seizure data.
India emerged as a key manufacturing hub for tramadol prior to its scheduling as a controlled substance in 2018. That decision, taken under India’s Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, tightened controls on production and export and was widely expected to curb diversion. Subsequent reporting suggested that large-scale seizures declined in some countries, while prices in illicit markets rose. Demand, however, did not disappear.
In early 2025, Indian regulators made further moves, banning the manufacture and export of unapproved tapentadol-carisoprodol combinations after a BBC investigation linked pharmaceutical exports to public health crises in Nigeria and Ghana. Indian authorities confirmed raids on a major manufacturer and the revocation of export licences, describing the measures as necessary to prevent misuse abroad, according to Indian regulator actions.
By enforcement standards, this crackdown was significant. But it also accelerated a shift that was already well underway.
A synthetic high
According to Jallal Toufiq, President of the United Nations’ International Narcotics Control Board, “The rapid expansion of the illicit synthetic drug industry represents a major global public health threat with potentially disastrous consequences for humankind.” Nowhere is that truer than in West Africa.
As pharmaceutical opioids became harder to obtain in the post-tramadol crackdown era, a new substance rapidly gained traction in Sierra Leone: a synthetic drug locally known as kush. By 2024, the scale of harm associated with kush had prompted the government to declare a national public health emergency.
Chemical analysis commissioned by the Sierra Leonean government and carried out by GI-TOC in collaboration with the Netherlands’ Clingendael Institute revealed that nearly 50% of kush samples contained nitazenes—high-potency synthetic opioids that can be several times stronger than fentanyl. Other samples contained synthetic cannabinoids, with some containing both.
While precise mortality figures remain unavailable, experts warn that kush has likely caused thousands of deaths in West Africa. Speaking at a regional conference on drug markets in Accra in November 2025, GI-TOC Executive Director Mark Shaw cautioned that the fast-paced evolution of synthetic drug markets in West Africa was outpacing authorities’ ability to understand and respond to them, noting that gaps in evidence and surveillance had “real consequences.”
By 2025, kush and similar synthetic mixtures had been reported in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, The Gambia, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, signalling a fast-moving regional phenomenon rather than a localised trend.
Enforcement and substitution
A 2025 commentary in The Lancet cautioned that persistent opioid demand in West Africa, combined with weak regulatory oversight and porous borders, increased the risk that new and more dangerous synthetics would emerge to fill gaps left by restricted pharmaceuticals.
That warning appears increasingly prescient. Investigations now suggest that nitazenes and related substances are sourced through complex supply chains involving chemical manufacturers in East Asia and Europe, moving via maritime freight, air cargo and postal services. Some compounds arrive as finished products; others as precursor chemicals that can be processed locally.
Market structures have also shifted. What initially involved larger criminal networks has fragmented into smaller, decentralised operations, complicating enforcement and intelligence-gathering efforts.
Harmattan’s blind spot
Assessed against this backdrop, Operation Harmattan’s emphasis on airport and postal hub seizures appears limited in scope. While the operation did intercept a range of substances, it did little to address the structural drivers of the synthetic drug market: persistent demand, limited access to legitimate pain treatment medications, and severe gaps in addiction care.
The Africa Organised Crime Index 2025 documents the scale of the challenge. Synthetic drug markets across the continent have expanded steadily since 2019, with North Africa scoring particularly high due to tramadol and other opioids. At the same time, resilience to organised crime has declined across most African states, with prevention and victim support among the weakest policy areas.
Public health capacity remains especially limited. The UN’s Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates suggest that only a small fraction of people with drug use disorders in Africa receive any form of treatment, while overdose-reversal medicines such as naloxone are rarely available outside pilot programmes.
Policy gaps
In September 2025, the African Union adopted a new continental drug strategy aimed at strengthening responses to synthetic drug manufacture and trafficking. While welcomed by experts, implementation remains in its early stages, and its impact has yet to be felt on the ground.
Meanwhile, the crisis continues to evolve faster than institutions can respond. Early-warning systems remain underdeveloped, drug-checking services are scarce, and harm reduction interventions are unevenly applied across the region.
A familiar pattern
West Africa’s experience mirrors developments elsewhere. In the United States, restrictions on prescription opioids in the 2010s were followed by transitions to heroin and then fentanyl. When China scheduled classes of fentanyl analogues, manufacturers rapidly modified chemical structures to stay ahead of regulations, releasing other, more potent synthetic substances onto the market.
The lesson is not that regulation is futile, but that enforcement in isolation is insufficient. India’s tramadol decision to restrict dangerous pharmaceutical exports was a key step; but without international coordination and parallel investments in treatment, harm reduction and pain management in consumer countries, it accelerated a shift toward substances that are far more lethal and continue to evade control.
Time for change
Addressing West Africa’s synthetic drug crisis will require confronting what enforcement-led approaches have failed to resolve. That means expanding access to evidence-based treatment, scaling up opioid substitution therapy, making naloxone more widely available, investing in drug-checking and early-warning systems, and tackling the social conditions—poverty, displacement and inadequate healthcare—that drive harmful drug use.
It also demands accountability beyond the region. Kars de Bruijne , a researcher from the Netherlands’ Clingendael Institute, argues that responsibility for the kush crisis is shared across borders – including by countries that manufacture and export the chemical precursors feeding West Africa’s synthetic drug markets.
Until enforcement operations are matched with these measures, West Africa risks being locked into a cycle where each apparent success merely clears the ground for the next, more dangerous wave of synthetic drugs. Operation Harmattan seized drugs and made arrests, but failed to reduce harm. Put more simply: the crisis is anything but resolved.
