REPORTAHOLICS World Service
REPORTAHOLICSAn 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 REPORTAHOLICS Eye investigation has revealed.
Aveo Prescribed drugs, based mostly in Mumbai, makes a variety of capsules that go underneath completely different model names and are packaged to appear like reputable 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 shouldn’t be 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 well-liked as avenue medicine in lots of West African international locations, as a result of they’re so low cost and extensively obtainable.
The REPORTAHOLICS World Service discovered packets of them, branded with the Aveo brand, on the market on the streets of Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Ivoirian cities and cities.
Having traced the medicine again to Aveo’s manufacturing unit in India, the REPORTAHOLICS despatched an undercover operative contained in the manufacturing unit, posing as an African businessman seeking to provide opioids to Nigeria. Utilizing a hidden digital camera, the REPORTAHOLICS filmed considered one of Aveo’s administrators, Vinod Sharma, displaying off the identical harmful merchandise the REPORTAHOLICS discovered on the market throughout West Africa.
Within the secretly recorded footage, the operative tells Sharma that his plan is to promote the capsules to youngsters in Nigeria “who all love this product”. Sharma does not flinch. “OK,” he replies, earlier than explaining that if customers take two or three capsules without delay, they will “loosen up” and agrees they will 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 individuals 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 job pressure of about 100 native residents whose mission is to raid drug sellers and take these capsules off the streets.
“The medicine devour the sanity of those that abuse them,” says Maham, “like a fireplace 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 REPORTAHOLICS group adopted the duty pressure as they jumped on to motorbikes and, following a tip off a few drug deal, launched a raid in considered one of Tamale’s poorest neighbourhoods. On the best way they handed a younger man slumped in a stupor who, based on locals, had taken these medicine.
When the vendor was caught, he was carrying a plastic bag stuffed with inexperienced capsules labelled Tafrodol. The packets had been stamped with the distinctive brand of Aveo Prescribed drugs.
It is not simply in Tamale that Aveo’s capsules are inflicting distress. The REPORTAHOLICS discovered comparable merchandise, made by Aveo, have been seized by police elsewhere in Ghana.
We additionally discovered proof that Aveo’s capsules 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 known 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 individuals, gives the most important marketplace for these capsules. It has been estimated that about 4 million Nigerians abuse some type of opioid, based on Nigeria’s Nationwide Bureau of Statistics.
The Chairman of Nigeria’s Drug and Regulation Enforcement Company (NDLEA), Brig Gen Mohammed Buba Marwa, advised the REPORTAHOLICS, opioids are “devastating our youths, our households, it is in each neighborhood in Nigeria”.
In 2018, following a REPORTAHOLICS Africa Eye investigation into the sale of opioids as avenue medicine, Nigerian authorities tried to get a grip on a extensively abused opioid painkiller known 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 capsules. On the similar 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, a good stronger opioid, blended with the muscle-relaxant carisoprodol.
West African officers are warning that opioid exporters look like utilizing these new mixture capsules as an alternative choice to tramadol and to evade the crackdown.
Within the Aveo manufacturing unit there have been cartons of the mixture medicine stacked on high of one another, virtually ceiling-high. On his desk, Vinod Sharma laid out packet after packet of the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail capsules that the corporate markets underneath a variety of names together with Tafrodol, the most well-liked, in addition to TimaKing and Tremendous Royal-225.
He advised the REPORTAHOLICS’s undercover group that “scientists” working in his manufacturing unit might mix completely different medicine to “make a brand new product”.
Watch India’s Opioid Kings from REPORTAHOLICS Eye Investigations on iPlayer or, if you’re exterior 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 “provides the results of an opioid” together with very deep sleep.
“It might 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 provides very deep sleep, leisure. It appears 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 intervals of as much as three weeks. Withdrawal signs embrace nervousness, 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 mixture. 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 corporations can’t legally manufacture and export unlicensed medicine except these medicine meet the requirements of the importing nation. Aveo ships Tafrodol and comparable merchandise to Ghana, the place this mixture of tapentadol and carisoprodol is, based on 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, advised 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 robust pharmaceutical regulatory system.
It added that exports from India to different international locations are intently monitored and that just lately tightened regulation is strictly enforced. It additionally known as importing international locations to assist India’s efforts by guaranteeing that they had equally robust regulatory methods.
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 forestall wrongdoing. The regulator stated it should take instant motion towards any pharmaceutical agency concerned in malpractice.
Aveo shouldn’t be the one Indian firm making and exporting unlicensed opioids. Publicly obtainable export knowledge counsel different pharma corporations manufacture comparable merchandise, and medicines with completely different branding are extensively obtainable throughout West Africa.
These producers are damaging the repute 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 yr.
Talking about his assembly with Sharma, the REPORTAHOLICS’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 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 REPORTAHOLICS group adopted the native job pressure on one ultimate 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 will burn your medicine”.
However even because the flames destroyed a number of hundred packets of Tafrodol, the “sellers and suppliers” on the high of this chain, 1000’s of miles away in India, had been churning out thousands and thousands extra – and getting wealthy on the earnings of distress.
