NUZTO World Service
NUZTOAn 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 NUZTO Eye investigation has revealed.
Aveo Prescribed drugs, based mostly in Mumbai, makes a variety of tablets that go underneath completely different model names and are packaged to appear to be authentic medicines. However all comprise the identical dangerous mixture of components: tapentadol, a robust opioid, and carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant so addictive it is banned in Europe.
This mix of medication just isn’t licensed to be used anyplace on this planet and might trigger respiration difficulties and seizures. An overdose can kill. Regardless of the dangers, these opioids are well-liked as road medicine in lots of West African international locations, as a result of they’re so low cost and extensively accessible.
The NUZTO 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 medicine again to Aveo’s manufacturing facility in India, the NUZTO despatched an undercover operative contained in the manufacturing facility, posing as an African businessman trying to provide opioids to Nigeria. Utilizing a hidden digicam, the NUZTO filmed one among Aveo’s administrators, Vinod Sharma, displaying off the identical harmful merchandise the NUZTO 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 without delay, they’ll “calm down” and agrees they’ll get “excessive”. In direction of the tip 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 thousands and thousands of younger folks throughout West Africa.
Within the metropolis of Tamale, in northern Ghana, so many younger individuals are taking unlawful opioids that one of many metropolis’s chiefs, Alhassan Maham, has created a voluntary activity drive of about 100 native residents whose mission is to raid drug sellers and take these tablets off the streets.
“The medicine eat 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 medicine, he stated, have “wasted our lives”.
The NUZTO crew adopted the duty drive as they jumped on to motorbikes and, following a tip off a few drug deal, launched a raid in one among Tamale’s poorest neighbourhoods. On the best way they handed a younger man slumped in a stupor who, in response to locals, had taken these medicine.
When the vendor was caught, he was carrying a plastic bag full of inexperienced tablets labelled Tafrodol. The packets had been stamped with the distinctive emblem of Aveo Prescribed drugs.
It isn’t simply in Tamale that Aveo’s tablets are inflicting distress. The NUZTO discovered related 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 power drink to extend the excessive.
Publicly-available export knowledge present that Aveo Prescribed drugs, together with a sister firm referred to as Westfin Worldwide, is transport thousands and thousands of those tablets to Ghana and different West African international locations.
Nigeria, with a inhabitants of 225 million folks, gives 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 NUZTO, opioids are “devastating our youths, our households, it is in each neighborhood in Nigeria”.
In 2018, following a NUZTO Africa Eye investigation into the sale of opioids as road medicine, Nigerian authorities tried to get a grip on a extensively 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 rules on tramadol.
Not lengthy after this crackdown, Aveo Prescribed drugs started to export a brand new tablet based mostly on tapentadol, a good stronger opioid, blended with the muscle-relaxant carisoprodol.
West African officers are warning that opioid exporters seem like utilizing these new mixture tablets as an alternative to tramadol and to evade the crackdown.
Within the Aveo manufacturing facility there have been cartons of the mix medicine stacked on prime of one another, nearly ceiling-high. On his desk, Vinod Sharma laid out packet after packet of the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail tablets that the corporate markets underneath a variety of names together with Tafrodol, the preferred, in addition to TimaKing and Tremendous Royal-225.
He instructed the NUZTO’s undercover crew that “scientists” working in his manufacturing facility may mix completely different medicine to “make a brand new product”.
Watch India’s Opioid Kings from NUZTO Eye Investigations on iPlayer or, in case you are outdoors the UK, watch on YouTube.
Aveo’s new product is much more harmful than the tramadol it has changed. Based on Dr Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor on the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, India, tapentadol “offers the results 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, rest. It seems like a really harmful mixture.”
Carisoprodol has been banned in Europe as a result of it’s addictive. It’s authorized to be used within the US however just for brief durations of as much as three weeks. Withdrawal signs embody 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 scientific trials on the efficacy of this mix. Not like 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 firms can not legally manufacture and export unlicensed medicine until these medicine meet the requirements of the importing nation. Aveo ships Tafrodol and related 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 transport 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 medicine regulator, the CDSCO, instructed us the Indian authorities recognises its duty in the 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 not too long ago tightened regulation is strictly enforced. It additionally referred to as importing international locations to help India’s efforts by making certain that they had equally robust regulatory techniques.
The CDSCO acknowledged it has taken up the matter with different international locations, together with these in West Africa, and is dedicated to working with them to stop wrongdoing. The regulator stated it’s going to take speedy motion towards any pharmaceutical agency concerned in malpractice.
Aveo just isn’t the one Indian firm making and exporting unlicensed opioids. Publicly accessible export knowledge counsel different pharma firms manufacture related merchandise, and medicines with completely different branding are extensively accessible throughout West Africa.
These producers are damaging the status of India’s fast-growing pharmaceutical business, which makes high-quality generic medicines upon which thousands and thousands of individuals worldwide rely and manufactures vaccines which have saved thousands and thousands of lives. The business’s exports are price at the very least $28bn (£22bn) a 12 months.
Talking about his assembly with Sharma, the NUZTO’s undercover operative, whose identification 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 nose to nose… with one of many males on the root of Africa’s opioid disaster, one of many males who really 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 NUZTO crew adopted the native activity drive on one last raid that turned up much more of Aveo’s Tafrodol. That night they gathered in a neighborhood park to burn the medicine that they had seized.
“We’re burning it in an open glare for everyone to see,” stated Zickay, one of many leaders, because the packets had 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 medicine”.
However even because the flames destroyed a number of hundred packets of Tafrodol, the “sellers and suppliers” on the prime of this chain, hundreds of miles away in India, had been churning out thousands and thousands extra – and getting wealthy on the earnings of distress.
