Searching for Accountability in Sierra Leone’s Drug Epidemic

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Sierra Leone has an increasingly pervasive “death trap” drug: kush.

Kush is made of a mix of synthetic substances like nitazenes, compounds that can be over twenty-five times more damaging than fentanyl and cannabis due to their high potency. This drug has not only impacted its users physically and led to thousands of deaths, it has also caused two-thirds of Sierra Leone’s newly admitted psychiatric patients to seek help to combat their addiction.

In Sierra Leone, open wounds, swollen limbs, and people – especially young men – walking into moving traffic has become a common sight for local communities. President Julius MaadaBio’s description of drug abuse as an “existential threat” and a “national emergency” in April 2024 serves to reiterate the devastating impacts of kush, which have ravaged the nation.

The expansion of drug markets in Sierra Leone may be explained by decentralised protection – a system wherein a myriad of small actors, including local officers and officials, offer protection to those involved within every stage of the trade and this allows supply chains to continue. Not only is corruption rampant in these protected supply chains, but their origins remain increasingly unclear.

Currently, media outlets shed light on the dangers of kush but fail to trace the vital actors who supply the ingredients needed to manufacture substances which the drug is composed of. While exposing the true origins of kush’s manufacturers, these outlets often redirect accountability abroad to vague ‘international sources’, which muddles the application of international law in holding states liable for their role in Sierra Leone’s rising rates of drug abuse.

This leads to the following pertinent questions: who is trafficking the ingredients for these drugs illegally, how are they getting away with it, who should be held accountable, and what is impeding this process? In answering these questions, one finds that existing legal international frameworks were simply not designed to handle large and complicated supply chains, and with these structural gaps come the production and reproduction of drug supply chains that international bodies fail to hold accountable. Sierra Leone appears to be caught in the midst.

Kush, the Law, and the Transnational Drug Trade

As the active ingredients in kush require specialised equipment to manufacture, and Sierra Leone does not have the capacity for such technology, many suspect that kush’s supply chain may not even begin in Africa, but in Asia.

Research into supply chains and chemical testing of kush have highlighted that nitazenes and cannabinoids are being imported into Sierra Leone via postal courier services and maritime routes, mainly from China. Repeatedly, local manufacturers of drugs known as ‘cooks’ have reported purchasing active ingredients in kush online, specifically using courier services from suppliers located in China through sites such as Alibaba and Made in China, according to The Global Initiative.

Procuring the ingredients in this way makes it difficult to hold sellers accountable. Suppliers in China on these websites often use euphemisms to conceal the substance being traded, thus shielding vendors from liability. As a result, the transnational drug supply chain is both created and perpetuated by weak regulations surrounding online trading. These weak regulations include a lack of law enforcement, wherein the digital markets appeal to new users who avoided traditional drug markets due to the fear of law enforcement. Moreover, the resilience of vendors is greater when they sell online; if a site is shut down, suppliers and purchasers may switch to another site.

Protections offered by corrupt officers in Sierra Leone, such as bribes offered to longshoremen to ignore the contents of certain packages, or officers re-selling seized kush to dealers through middlemen, allow drug supply chains to proliferate. However, these individual acts of corruption by officers ultimately operate because of the structural issues within international legal conventions that fail to effectively combat the transnational drug trade market.

International bodies such as the United Nations (UN) are failing to act because the drug supply chains conventions, such as the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, were built to tackle supply chains of a certain structure and not the supply chain seen in Sierra Leone.

During the time it was created, the most prominent drugs were plant-based, requiring large scale cultivation not seen with the synthetic drug kush. However, being a synthetic drug, kush is made up of chemical precursors. Suppliers which participate in the illicit drug trade can get away with not facing punishment by slightly altering the chemical structure of the illicit substances they are producing, skirting the scheduled precursors listed in the 1988 UN Convention under Article 12. These are called “pre-precursors” wherein suppliers manufacture the precursors of a precursor, allowing suppliers to avoid responsibility and allowing ‘cooks’ to create the desired end product.

Moreover, conventions and legal frameworks like these were made to obstruct and prevent large quantities travelling internationally, whereas the active ingredients needed within kush are bought online and shipped in small quantities through the postal services to Sierra Leone. Since the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has no jurisdiction or enforcement powers over parcels transferred by the postal system, as its sole purpose is to support countries to build the capacity to fight drugs, it can only set guidelines for how postal security officers should be trained.

Can States be Held to Account by International Law?

Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey, an assistant professor in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, highlighted that to reduce rates of drug abuse in Sierra Leone, “socioeconomic reconfiguration” is required.

She mentioned that this is mainly “young men” who “do not feel they are part of the superstructure of society.” For the Sierra Leonean government to build state capacity and effectively mitigate the drug crisis, they should consider improving the educational sector for instance, to ensure that young Sierra Leoneans are able to make a livelihood, according to the professor.

The burden of responsibility to fight kush must fall on the United Nations and Sierra Leone’s government, as structural weaknesses and corruption have allowed the supply chain of kush to flourish. Firstly, the UNODC must write a new convention that evolves along with the evolving drug markets, especially with its digitalisation and the introduction of pre-precursors. Moreover, it must be able to support China in shutting down suppliers who employ deception and exploit weak online regulations to export illicit substances. Furthermore, Sierra Leone must consider the support it requires from the UNODC to weed out corruption shown by officials who take bribes and turn a blind eye to the illicit substances which cross the borders of their country.

Written by Alia Abdelhamid

Edited by Ruth Otim