Nigerian Meth

Nigeria

By Andrew Morgan
public health, nigeria, lagos, meth, meth labs, drug enforcement

A search for clandestine methamphetamine production sites in Nigeria

A report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2013, describes the ecosystem for methamphetamine in West Africa as seemingly young and extraordinarily profitable. They describe how conditions are ripe for flows of resources to be outsourced to this part of the world where “the difficulty lies in gaining access to sufficient amounts of precursor chemicals (primarily ephedrine) to produce the drug in commercial quantities. Given the loosely regulated pharmaceutical industry in West Africa, this hurdle can be overcome.”

The barriers for outsourcing the production of crystal meth there are quite low. The drugs are then sent back to the high value markets in East Asia where there is significant demand from a growing pool of middle-class users with increasing disposable incomes. If the products can make it as far as Japan, it is estimated that 1 kilogram of crystal meth can sell for over $100,000 USD. The report also highlights the logistical knowledge of drug traffickers in Nigeria being taken advantage of where, “almost all of the detected trafficking to Asia has involved the use of commercial air couriers, a technique at which Nigerian traffickers excel.

Nigeria’s national drug enforcement agency has made it clear that meth production has become a significant problem. In a statement released in May of this year, they reported that in the last seven years (between 2009-2016) almost a ton of methamphetamines had been confiscated in dozens of home-grown laboratories across the country as well as from at least 162 couriers detained in Nigerian airports over the same period, up from only a third of that a year prior. In 2016, the same agency also reported dismantling the first industrial scale meth laboratory that was estimated to produce four tons of methamphetamine per week.

Ease of production and lucrative markets for export are two main reasons for the growth of methamphetamine production in Nigeria. It also carries significant public health risks and expensive cleanup costs. “Five to seven pounds of toxic waste are produced per pound of meth. These hazardous chemicals may be dumped on the ground or in nearby streams and lakes, buried or simply left behind. Toxic wastes can contaminate drinking water.” (Bartos 2005) Production is an attractive startup industry as labs can be located almost anywhere and with the losely regulated pharmacuetical market in Nigeria, there is easy to access materials/chemicals, especially precursor chemicals like ephedrine which are largely exported from one of Nigeria’s principal trading partners, China. The average cost to clean up one lab can exceed $4,000. (Bartos 2005)

As no data set of previously discovered labs exists yet for spatial analysis, lab sites reported in various Nigerian news outlets were approximated through internet research and traced to points using Google maps and GeoJSON. At each site, additional information was added to the points including dates and production capacities.

Outlined on this map are the beakers which represent discovered lab sites, red buffer zones of a 500 meter radius around the site which represent potential hazards to ground water contamination from toxic waste, and airports which will connect production to trafficking and display intercepts of attempted meth exports in the last 7 years.

While previous studies on predicting lab locations where helpful in early literature review, the studies were primarily conducted in the United States and based of (in some cases) hundreds of discovered clandestine labs. For these reasons, the same socio-economic variables were not necessarily as applicable or easy to identify to the Nigerian locations. Furthermore, there is no indication that use of methamphetamine is a growing concern with the incentive to export to high value markets in Asia being very strong.