A growing investigation into opioid flows from India to West Africa is drawing attention from public health officials and clinicians, as high-strength tapentadol tablets appear to be contributing to a rapidly evolving substance crisis in the region. What is raising eyebrows in medical circles is not just the scale of distribution, but the strength of formulations and their downstream misuse patterns. Millions of tablets manufactured in India have been documented entering markets in countries including Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, where regulatory approval for such high-potency tapentadol is reportedly absent.
Some consignments have been labeled in shipping documents as harmless medicines for human consumption, despite the compounds involved not being authorized in multiple importing nations. Clinicians and researchers in West Africa report that tapentadol is increasingly being…
