Sierra Leone 'kush' drug made of ingredients from China, UK, report says

(Reuters) - New testing of a cheap and deadly drug that has triggered a national emergency in Sierra Leone reveals it is composed of synthetic opioids and cannabinoids imported from abroad, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio declared a national emergency on substance abuse last April following calls for a crackdown on the drug known as kush, which is also used in at least five other West African countries.

But the lack of information about the chemicals in kush and their origins had complicated efforts to combat it, according to the report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and Clingendael, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

The drug has long been widely rumoured to contain everything from rat poison to acetone and human bones and to be made fully in Sierra Leone.

Instead, the tests, requested by the Sierra Leone government, revealed some samples containing synthetic opioids known as nitazenes, which are up to 25 times more potent than fentanyl.

The findings also indicated that China, the UK and the Netherlands are "the key exporters of kush" and its ingredients, the report said.

"Sierra Leone has been in the dark about what was in kush for years and (the country lacks) the necessary testing capacity," said Kars de Bruijne, senior research fellow at Clingendael.

The research published on Tuesday can help authorities fight overdoses, with naloxone an obvious treatment for users of kush made with opioids, he said. It can also help authorities identify "points of production" abroad and curb kush's prevalence in Sierra Leone, he said.

Naloxone is a medicine that reverses or blocks the effects of opioids such as fentanyl.

Kush's low price makes it accessible to disillusioned, unemployed youth in Sierra Leone.

While there are no official figures on deaths attributed to kush, a spike several years ago led authorities to carry out group cremations, the report said.

"Likely thousands of people have died from kush in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Gambia. And the drug is spreading fast," said Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo, director of GI-TOC's Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa.

The presence of nitazenes in kush samples shows the drug is "part of a global threat, and not only a West African challenge," she said.

"It is likely just the first of a growing range of synthetic drugs targeting the region."

(Reporting by Robbie Corey-Boulet, Editing by William Maclean)