Benin

Men loading cargo in one of Benin's ports, which often serve as transit points for the Nigerian drug trade.

Apart from counterfeit pharmaceuticals, marijuana is the only drug produced in Benin, but indications are that most of the marijuana produced is for local consumption. Although there are no reliable estimates of drug consumption rates in Benin, it is widely believed that marijuana is the most commonly used illegal drug. In the past two decades, sale of marijuana in Benin has increasingly fallen under the purview of well-organized, violent, and highly profitable drug syndicates, often operating multinationally with concerns in Nigeria and other West African nations. Benin is principally a transit point rather than an origin point on the syndicates' drug trafficking routes, with the country's easily crossed borders allowing Nigerian drug traffickers to use Benin's ports to ship cannabis, heroin, and cocaine to points further along the routes. It is also a frequent midway transit point for the traffic of South American cocaine and southeast Asian heroin.

A set of comprehensive antidrug laws modeled after the United Nations (UN) conventions was passed in 1997, but the country remains essentially unable to consistently or effectively enforce them. Policy is shaped by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice, Legislation, and Human Rights. The job of combating the drug trade is shared by the Gendarmerie Nationale (the national police force), Customs, and the Office for the Control of Illicit Traffic of Drugs (OCERTID), established in 2000. Since its inception, OCERTID has been personnel-and resource-poor, and has experienced little cooperation with the gendarmerie, which has made coordinating major operations a logistical nightmare. Furthermore, the porousness of Benin's borders, easily traversed by land, sea, or air, has presented a challenge simply to estimating the extent of drug traffic in the country, even apart from reducing it. Most OCERTID training is “on the job,” as the office lacks the resources to provide comprehensive relevant training for new recruits. Resources are generally spent on targeting and arresting small-scale middlemen and end users, with little concerted effort at targeting the national and multinational cartels that profit from and organize the drug trade.

A major point of concern since 2007 has been the effort by OCERTID's administrators to weed out what they call “morally unfit” agents. Since before OCERTID's founding, Benin has experienced problems with seized drugs going missing, presumed stolen by corrupt officials either for personal purposes or at the behest of the syndicates and other criminal interests. Many of OCERTID's administrators were fired in late 2007 over charges of this and similar corruption. The new director, Bertin Adanle, made “cleaning house” a priority. Adanle also attempted to increase deterrence of trafficking through the airport, but increased airport arrests seemed to do little apart from redirecting traffic across harder-to-monitor land routes, and indeed in Adanle's first year in office, total seizures by weight actually declined.

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