NEWSTORN World Service
NEWSTORNAn Indian pharmaceutical firm is manufacturing unlicensed, extremely addictive opioids and exporting them illegally to West Africa the place they’re driving a serious public well being disaster in international locations together with Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D’Ivoire, a NEWSTORN Eye investigation has revealed.
Aveo Prescribed drugs, based mostly in Mumbai, makes a variety of tablets that go below totally different model names and are packaged to seem like respectable medicines. However all include the identical dangerous mixture of components: tapentadol, a strong opioid, and carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant so addictive it is banned in Europe.
This mixture of medication is just not licensed to be used wherever on the earth and may trigger respiration difficulties and seizures. An overdose can kill. Regardless of the dangers, these opioids are common as avenue medication in lots of West African international locations, as a result of they’re so low cost and broadly accessible.
The NEWSTORN World Service discovered packets of them, branded with the Aveo emblem, on the market on the streets of Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Ivoirian cities and cities.
Having traced the medication again to Aveo’s manufacturing unit in India, the NEWSTORN despatched an undercover operative contained in the manufacturing unit, posing as an African businessman trying to provide opioids to Nigeria. Utilizing a hidden digicam, the NEWSTORN filmed certainly one of Aveo’s administrators, Vinod Sharma, exhibiting off the identical harmful merchandise the NEWSTORN discovered on the market throughout West Africa.
Within the secretly recorded footage, the operative tells Sharma that his plan is to promote the tablets to youngsters in Nigeria “who all love this product”. Sharma would not flinch. “OK,” he replies, earlier than explaining that if customers take two or three tablets directly, they’ll “chill out” and agrees they’ll get “excessive”. In the direction of the top of the assembly, Sharma says: “That is very dangerous for the well being,” including “these days, that is enterprise.”
It’s a enterprise that’s damaging the well being and destroying the potential of tens of millions of younger folks throughout West Africa.
Within the metropolis of Tamale, in northern Ghana, so many younger persons are taking unlawful opioids that one of many metropolis’s chiefs, Alhassan Maham, has created a voluntary process pressure of about 100 native residents whose mission is to raid drug sellers and take these tablets off the streets.
“The medication devour the sanity of those that abuse them,” says Maham, “like a hearth burns when kerosene is poured on it.” One addict in Tamale put it much more merely. The medication, he stated, have “wasted our lives”.
The NEWSTORN workforce adopted the duty pressure as they jumped on to motorbikes and, following a tip off a couple of drug deal, launched a raid in certainly one of Tamale’s poorest neighbourhoods. On the way in which they handed a younger man slumped in a stupor who, in response to locals, had taken these medication.
When the seller was caught, he was carrying a plastic bag full of inexperienced tablets labelled Tafrodol. The packets have been stamped with the distinctive emblem of Aveo Prescribed drugs.
It is not simply in Tamale that Aveo’s tablets are inflicting distress. The NEWSTORN discovered comparable merchandise, made by Aveo, have been seized by police elsewhere in Ghana.
We additionally discovered proof that Aveo’s tablets are on the market on the streets of Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire, the place youngsters dissolve them in an alcoholic vitality drink to extend the excessive.
Publicly-available export information present that Aveo Prescribed drugs, together with a sister firm referred to as Westfin Worldwide, is delivery tens of millions of those tablets to Ghana and different West African international locations.
Nigeria, with a inhabitants of 225 million folks, offers the largest marketplace for these tablets. It has been estimated that about 4 million Nigerians abuse some type of opioid, in response to Nigeria’s Nationwide Bureau of Statistics.
The Chairman of Nigeria’s Drug and Legislation Enforcement Company (NDLEA), Brig Gen Mohammed Buba Marwa, instructed the NEWSTORN, opioids are “devastating our youths, our households, it is in each group in Nigeria”.
In 2018, following a NEWSTORN Africa Eye investigation into the sale of opioids as avenue medication, Nigerian authorities tried to get a grip on a broadly abused opioid painkiller referred to as tramadol.
The federal government banned the sale of tramadol with out prescription, imposed strict limits on the utmost dose, and cracked down on imports of unlawful tablets. On the identical time, Indian authorities tightened export laws on tramadol.
Not lengthy after this crackdown, Aveo Prescribed drugs started to export a brand new tablet based mostly on tapentadol, an excellent stronger opioid, blended with the muscle-relaxant carisoprodol.
West African officers are warning that opioid exporters look like utilizing these new mixture tablets as an alternative choice to tramadol and to evade the crackdown.
Within the Aveo manufacturing unit there have been cartons of the mix medication stacked on prime of one another, virtually ceiling-high. On his desk, Vinod Sharma laid out packet after packet of the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail tablets that the corporate markets below a variety of names together with Tafrodol, the most well-liked, in addition to TimaKing and Tremendous Royal-225.
He instructed the NEWSTORN’s undercover workforce that “scientists” working in his manufacturing unit may mix totally different medication to “make a brand new product”.
Watch India’s Opioid Kings from NEWSTORN Eye Investigations on iPlayer or, if you’re outdoors the UK, watch on YouTube.
Aveo’s new product is much more harmful than the tramadol it has changed. In response to Dr Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor on the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, India, tapentadol “offers the consequences of an opioid” together with very deep sleep.
“It may very well be deep sufficient that folks do not breathe, and that results in drug overdose,” he defined. “And together with that, you might be giving one other agent, carisoprodol, which additionally offers very deep sleep, leisure. It seems like a really harmful mixture.”
Carisoprodol has been banned in Europe as a result of it’s addictive. It’s permitted to be used within the US however just for quick intervals of as much as three weeks. Withdrawal signs embrace anxiousness, insomnia, and hallucinations.
When blended with tapentadol the withdrawal is even “extra extreme” in comparison with common opioids, stated Dr Shukla. “It is a pretty painful expertise.”
He stated he knew of no medical trials on the efficacy of this mix. In contrast to tramadol, which is authorized to be used in restricted doses, the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail “doesn’t sound like a rational mixture”, he stated. “This isn’t one thing that’s licensed for use in our nation.”
In India, pharmaceutical corporations can’t legally manufacture and export unlicensed medication until these medication meet the requirements of the importing nation. Aveo ships Tafrodol and comparable merchandise to Ghana, the place this mix of tapentadol and carisoprodol is, in response to Ghana’s nationwide Drug Enforcement Company, unlicensed and unlawful. By delivery Tafrodol to Ghana, Aveo is breaking Indian legislation.
We put these allegations to Vinod Sharma and Aveo Prescribed drugs. They didn’t reply.
The Indian medication regulator, the CDSCO, instructed us the Indian authorities recognises its duty in direction of world public well being and is dedicated to making sure India has a accountable and powerful pharmaceutical regulatory system.
It added that exports from India to different international locations are intently monitored and that lately tightened regulation is strictly enforced. It additionally referred to as importing international locations to help India’s efforts by guaranteeing they’d equally sturdy regulatory programs.
The CDSCO said it has taken up the matter with different international locations, together with these in West Africa, and is dedicated to working with them to forestall wrongdoing. The regulator stated it’ll take fast motion towards any pharmaceutical agency concerned in malpractice.
Aveo is just not the one Indian firm making and exporting unlicensed opioids. Publicly accessible export information recommend different pharma corporations manufacture comparable merchandise, and medicines with totally different branding are broadly accessible throughout West Africa.
These producers are damaging the fame of India’s fast-growing pharmaceutical business, which makes high-quality generic medicines upon which tens of millions of individuals worldwide rely and manufactures vaccines which have saved tens of millions of lives. The business’s exports are value not less than $28bn (£22bn) a 12 months.
Talking about his assembly with Sharma, the NEWSTORN’s undercover operative, whose id should stay hid for his security, says: “Nigerian journalists have been reporting on this opioid disaster for greater than 20 years however lastly, I used to be head to head… with one of many males on the root of Africa’s opioid disaster, one of many males who truly makes this product and ships it into our international locations by the container load. He knew the hurt it was doing however he did not appear to care… describing it merely as enterprise.”
Again in Tamale, Ghana, the NEWSTORN workforce adopted the native process pressure on one remaining raid that turned up much more of Aveo’s Tafrodol. That night they gathered in an area park to burn the medication they’d seized.
“We’re burning it in an open glare for everyone to see,” stated Zickay, one of many leaders, because the packets have been doused in petrol and set ablaze, “so it sends a sign to the sellers and the suppliers: in the event that they get you, they’re going to burn your medication”.
However even because the flames destroyed a couple of hundred packets of Tafrodol, the “sellers and suppliers” on the prime of this chain, hundreds of miles away in India, have been churning out tens of millions extra – and getting wealthy on the income of distress.
