BBC World Service
BbcThe Indian pharmaceutical company produces unlicensed, highly addictive opioids and exports them illegally to West Africa, where they manage a major public health crisis in countries, including Ghana, Nigeria and Kot D'Ivory, an investigation into the BBC revealed.
Aveo Pharmaceuticals, based in Mumbai, makes a number of pills that go under different trademarks and are packed to look like legal medicines. But they all contain the same harmful combination of ingredients: Tapentadol, a powerful opioid and carizoprodol, muscle relaxant, so addictive that it is prohibited in Europe.
This combination of medicines is not licensed for use all over the world and can cause difficulties and seizures. Overdose can kill. Despite the risks, these opioids are popular as street drugs in many West African countries because they are so cheap and widely available.
The BBC World Service has found packages marked with the Aveo logo for sale on the streets of Ghanai, Nigerian and Ivoir cities and cities.
After tracing the drugs back to Aveo's factory in India, the BBC sent an operative undercover to the factory, posing as an African businessman who wants to supply opioid Nigeria. Using a hidden camera, the BBC filmed one of Aveo, Vinod Sharma's directors, showing the same dangerous products that BBC has found for sale in West Africa.
In secretly recorded footage, the operatives tells Sharma that his plan is to sell teenage pills in Nigeria, “which everyone loves this product.” Sharma does not flicker. “Okay,” he replies, before explaining that if users take two or three pills at a time, they can “relax” and agree that they can get “high”. Towards the end of the meeting, Sharma says, “It's very harmful to health,” adding “nowadays, it's a business.”
It is a business that damages health and destroys the potential of millions of young people in West Africa.
In the town of Tamale, in North Ghana, so many young people accept illegal opioids that one of the city's chiefs, Alhasan Maham, set up a voluntary working group of about 100 local citizens whose mission is to attack drug dealers and take these pills outside the streets.
“Medicines consume the strength of those who abuse them,” Mahaam says, “like fire, when kerosene is poured on it.” A drug addict in Tamale said it even more. The drugs, he said, have “wasted our lives.”
The BBC team followed the working group when they jumped on motorcycles and after a drug deal, an attack began in one of Tamale's most overwhelming neighborhoods. Along the way, a young man passed, who descended into a stupor, who, according to locals, took these drugs.
When the dealer was caught, he wore a plastic bag filled with green pills marked with taffrodol. The packages were stamped with the distinctive logo of Aveo Pharmaceuticals.
Not only in Tamale Aveo's pills cause misery. The BBC has found similar products made by Aveo, being seized by police elsewhere in Ghana.
We have also found evidence that Aveo's pills are sold on the streets of Nigeria and Cott D'Ivoire, where teenagers dissolve them in an alcoholic energy drink to increase the high.
Public -available export data shows that Aveo Pharmaceuticals, along with a nursing company called Westfin International, supplies millions of these tablets to Ghana and other West African countries.
Nigeria, with a population of 225 million, provides the largest market for these pills. It is estimated that about four million Nigerians abuse some form of opioids, according to Nigeria's National Statistical Bureau.
The chairman of the Nigerian Drugs and Law Enforcement Agency (NDlea), Brig -Gen Mohammed Buba Marva, told the BBC, the opioids “devastate our young people, of our families, this is in every community in Nigeria.”
In 2018, following an investigation into the BBC Africa eyes on the sale of opioids such as street drugs, the Nigerian authorities tried to deal with the widely abused opio -absolute painkiller called Tramadol.
The government has banned the sale of tramadol over -the -counter, has imposed strict restrictions on the maximum dose and cracked in the import of illegal pills. At the same time, the Indian authorities have tightened the provisions of Tramadol's exports.
Not long after, this repression, Aveo Pharmaceuticals began to export a new pill based on topentadol, even stronger opioid mixed with the musculoskeletal Carizoprodol.
West African officials warn that opioid exporters seem to use these new combined pills as a TRAMADOL substitute and avoid repression.
The Aveo factory had cardboard packaging from the combined medicines arranged on top of one another, almost high ceiling. At her desk, Vinod Sharma has exposed a package of Tapentadol-Carisoprodol cocktail pills, which the company offers on the market under a number of names, including Tafrodol, the most popular, as well as the plan and the Super Royal-225.
He told the BBC Undercover team that “scientists” working at his factory can combine various medicines to “make a new product”.
Aveo's new product is even more dangerous than Tramadol, which has replaced. According to Dr. Lecthang Shukla, an assistant at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, India, Tapentadol “gives the effects of opioid”, including a very deep sleep.
“It may be deep enough that people do not breathe and this leads to drug overdose,” he explained. “And at the same time, you give another agent, Carizoprodol, which also gives a very deep sleep, relaxation. It sounds like a very dangerous combination.”
Carizoprodol is banned in Europe because it is addictive. It has been approved for use in the United States, but only for short periods up to three weeks. Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, insomnia and hallucinations.
When mixed with a tampon, withdrawal is even “more severe” than regular opioids, said Dr. Shukla. “It's a pretty painful experience.”
He said he did not know about any clinical trials about the efficacy of this combination. Unlike Tramadol, which is legal for use in limited doses, the Tapentadol-Carisoprodol cocktail does not sound like a rational combination, “he said. “This is not something that is licensed to use in our country.”
In India, pharmaceutical companies cannot legally produce and export unlicensed medicines unless these drugs meet the country's standards. Aveo ships Tafrodol and similar Ghana products, where this combination of Tuppet and Carizoprodol is, according to the National Drug Administration Agency in Ghana, unlicensed and illegal. By supplying taffrodol to Ghana, Aveo violates Indian law.
We put these statements on Vinod Sharma and Aveo Pharmaceuticals. They did not answer.
The Indian drug regulator, CDSCO, told us that the Indian government acknowledges its responsibility for global public health and is committed to ensuring that India has a responsible and strong pharmaceutical regulatory system.
He added that exports from India to other countries are closely observed and recently tightened regulation is strictly applied. He also calls imported sides to support India's efforts, ensuring that they have similar strong regulatory systems.
CDSCO has said he has taken the issue with other countries, including those in West Africa, and is committed to working with them to prevent misconduct. The regulator said he would take immediate action against any pharmaceutical company involved in abuse.
Aveo is not the only Indian company that makes and exports unlicensed opioids. Publicly available export data suggest that other pharmaceutical companies produce similar products, and drugs of different brands are widely available in West Africa.
These manufacturers damage the reputation of the rapidly developing pharmaceutical industry in India, which makes high quality common medicines, of which millions of people around the world depend and produce vaccines that have saved millions of lives. The export of the industry costs at least $ 28 billion ($ 22 billion) a year.
Speaking About His Meeting with Sharma, The BBC's Undercover Opetive, Whose Identity Must Remain Concealed for His Safety, Says: “Nigerian Journalists Have Be Reporting O But Finally, I Was Face to Face… With One of Men at the heart of the opioid crisis in Africa, one of the men who actually makes this product and sends it to our countries in the container. .
Back to Tamale, Ghana, the BBC team followed the local working group at one last raid, which turned out to be even more than Aveo's Tafrodol. That evening, they gathered in a local park to burn the drugs they had seized.
“We burn it in an open glare so that everyone can see,” Zikay said, one of the leaders, as the packages were suffocated in gasoline and put on fire, “so he sends a signal to the sellers and suppliers: if they receive, they will, they will Your drugs burn. “
But even when the flames destroyed several hundred packs of taffrodol, the “sellers and suppliers” at the top of this chain, thousands of miles in India, killed millions more – and became rich in the profits of misery.