Fighting Nigeria's other drug war
As dusk draws in on the humid Lagos evening, the policemen check their machine guns one last time and head in unmarked cars to the bustling Apapa district.
The lead car slows to a halt by an elevated junction, its target in sight. Two plainclothes officers slip out and half-run to their target as the other vehicles pull to the edge of the road. While one agent grabs the suspect, the other seizes his plastic basket piled high with packets of brightly colored medicines.
It is their first haul in an operation carried out twice a week in Lagos, an essential part of the "other war on drugs" -- the fight against a trade in illegal medicines that is proving almost as lucrative and sometimes as lethal as that in narcotics.
The woman behind the strategy is Dora Akunyili, a charismatic pharmacist whose high-profile actions since becoming director general of Nigeria's food and drug agency in 2001 have sparked threats, arson and assassination attempts.
"Sometimes they use daggers, and two years ago they shot a policeman," says Dioka Ejionueme, Akunyili's handpicked director of enforcement.
Two hours later, the convoy returns to the darkened compound unscathed. Seven men -- from mere boys to stooped pensioners -- are hauled from the minivan. They squat next to the vehicles, heads down, and wait silently to be transferred to a police station.
Ejionueme surveys the rest of the haul: 13 heavily laden baskets -- one for each hawker and six others abandoned by salesmen who got away. Ejionueme runs his finger across the packets of drugs decorating the baskets' sides, expertly identifying Viagra, multivitamins and a dozen antibiotics from a quick glance at their distinctive shapes and sun-faded colors.
"Drugs should be stored at a particular temperature and be sold by people who know what they are doing," he said. "Most of these hawkers are illiterate. Imagine giving headache tablets to someone with malaria."
It was a modest victory in the fierce struggle against a trade for which Nigeria became notorious around the world. Whether such a vast underground industry can be brought down by a thousand small cuts is another question.
By the turn of the millennium, Nigerians had become among the world's most frequent victims of fake drugs. The country's reputation was so bad that its West African neighbors were refusing to import the medicines that came across its borders. An analysis in 2001 of 2,060 drug samples taken from the large wholesale markets where most medicines are easily bought showed that 62% were not registered with the country's National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control.
