THE CHALLENGE OF JIHADI DRUG CAPTAGON

There was something unusual about one of the recent drug interceptions at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos. It was not just the quantity involved or the fact that the consignment had crossed an international border. It was the name of the drug itself.

On August 22, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) announced the interception of 47,200 tablets of Captagon concealed inside locally made bathing soap, popularly known as Ghana soap. The consignment had arrived from Accra, Ghana, and according to the Agency, the suspect arrested in connection with it said the drugs were intended for northern Nigeria. In separate operations at the same airport, more than 3.9 million tablets of two opioid drugs, Tramaking and Tapentadol, were also recovered. The combined value of the seizures was put at more than ₦6.2 billion.

The figure is crazy, but there is another part of the story that deserves our attention. How many Nigerians actually know what Captagon is?

For many people, the names that immediately come to mind when drugs are mentioned are cannabis, cocaine, heroin, tramadol and codeine. These are substances that have featured prominently in conversations about drug abuse and trafficking in Nigeria for years. Captagon, however, is not a drug most Nigerians would recognise by name, and that unfamiliarity is precisely why its appearance should not be dismissed as just another seizure.

Captagon is an amphetamine-type stimulant that has become prominent in illegal drug markets in parts of the Middle East. Nigeria previously recorded a major interception of the drug in 2021, when more than 451,000 tablets were seized at Apapa Port in Lagos. Its reappearance years later is a reminder that the drug trade is not static. The substances being moved, the routes being used and the methods of concealment can all change.

Even the decision to hide the tablets inside bathing soap is instructive. Traffickers do not always need elaborate hiding places. Sometimes, they only need to put something illegal inside something that looks completely ordinary. A box of soap does not attract the same attention as a suspicious-looking package, and that is precisely the kind of thinking that makes modern drug trafficking difficult to tackle.

There is a wider concern here for Nigeria. The country already has a significant substance-use problem, with the National Drug Use Survey estimating that 14.3 million Nigerians aged 15 to 64 had used psychoactive substances other than alcohol and tobacco in the year preceding the survey. That means the country cannot afford to wait for every new drug to become popular before beginning to educate people about its dangers.

This is particularly important when young people are involved. A teenager cannot make a safe decision about a substance he or she knows nothing about. Parents may warn their children about cannabis or tramadol because those names are familiar, but the drug market is not obliged to remain familiar. New substances can enter through new routes, acquire new street names and find new users before families and communities fully understand what is happening.

The interception also shows why Nigeria’s drug problem cannot be considered only within its own borders. A consignment travelling from Ghana to Nigeria is part of a regional trafficking network. The people involved may operate in different countries, while the drugs themselves can move through several locations before reaching their intended market. This requires countries in the region to share intelligence and work together, because a weakness in one country’s border can quickly become a problem for another.

But stopping consignments is only one part of the answer. There must also be attention to the people financing these operations, the networks arranging the movement of the drugs and the demand that keeps the business profitable. At the same time, prevention and public education have to keep pace with the changing drug market.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the Captagon seizure is that Nigerians should not assume that the drugs we know today are the only drugs we will have to worry about tomorrow.

By the time an unfamiliar substance becomes common enough for everybody to know its name, it may already have found a market.

The real challenge, therefore, is not simply to keep stopping the drugs that have already become familiar. It is to see the next threat early, understand it quickly and prevent it from becoming another problem that Nigeria wishes it had taken seriously sooner.

Janet Udoh, Uyo, Akwa Ibom