Ghana

Drug Problems

The consumption, production, trade, and control of psychoactive substances, such as alcohol and caffeine-containing kola nuts, has been widespread in many parts of Ghana for centuries. For instance, the Ashanti Empire, which stretched over much of today's southern Ghana, tightly regulated the lucrative kola trade in the late 18th century. Cannabis, heroin, and cocaine only appeared in 20th-century Ghana. While these three drugs have been perceived as the major problem drugs in Ghana, widely used prescription drugs of substandard quality probably cause more deaths.

Cannabis was traded along the Ghanaian coast, in particular by Sierra Leoneans, since the 1930s. More widespread use and local cultivation of the drug only occurred after World War II, when Ghanaian ex-servicemen returned with the habit of cannabis smoking from British India. General economic decline in the 1970s accelerated the cultivation and trade of cannabis as an alternative to legal commodities, such as cocoa and maize. Cannabis also started to be smuggled to burgeoning consumer markets in Europe. Domestic demand was another factor that generated the growth of cannabis cultivation in Ghana. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that more than 8 percent of Ghanaians consumed cannabis by the late 1990s. Based on the most recent UNODC data, Ghana now has among the world's highest rates of cannabis consumption. UNODC estimates over 21 percent of the population between the ages of 16 and 64 use cannabis annually. Ghana also has [Page 316]relatively high rates of cocaine consumption, with approximately 1.1 percent of the adult population using cocaine annually. While Ghana had clearly graduated into one of West Africa's major cannabis centers, its level of production remains small compared to Africa's major cannabis exporters, South Africa and Morocco.

Heroin and cocaine appeared in Ghana more recently. Nigerian smugglers are held responsible for the introduction of heroin and cocaine smuggling in Ghana in the late 1980s. The transshipment of these two drugs from producing states in Asia and Latin America to major consuming centers in Europe and the United States has become relatively established in the course of the 1990s. Smuggling operations, now largely conducted by Ghanaians, can range from individual airborne couriers carrying less than one kg of the drugs to large seaborne container shipments, exemplified by a 30-kilogram cocaine seizure at a Ghanaian port in May 2006 that was supposed to be part of a two-metric-ton shipment.

Drug Policy

The Narcotics Drugs Law of 1990, which replaced the Pharmacy and Drugs Act of 1961, provides the legal framework for Ghana's current drug policy. The law established the Narcotics Control Board (NCB) as the central coordinating agency on drug supply and demand control. While the board formulates and partly implements policy, most of the implementation of policy is conducted by customs and a narcotics unit within the police force. Most of the actual enforcement of policy concentrates on heroin and cocaine supply at airports and seaports, as well as the arrest of domestic cannabis users and cultivators. In terms of policy effectiveness, the NCB has reported a steady increase in drug seizures, in particular for cannabis. It is unclear how far these seizures have influenced the Ghanaian domestic and transit market for drugs; in particular as academic assessments agree on the flourishing nature of drug markets in Ghana. Recent large-scale seizures of heroin and cocaine have underlined the lack of effectiveness. The above-mentioned 2006 cocaine seizure, which involved police complicity with drug traders and led to the replacement of the NCB leadership, has exposed the structural weaknesses of under-funded Ghanaian drug control.

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