An Unseen Amphetamine Epidemic in West Africa, 1960–1980

Abstract

Abstract From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, a massive trade in the stimulant known as “speed” took place from the United Kingdom to Nigeria. British manufacturers sold West African pharmacists hundreds of millions of doses of dexamphetamine sulphate, and the British government made a long and mostly ineffectual attempt to stop them. The dexamphetamine trade fed an epidemic of addiction caused by economic precarity and climate change. Students took it to study through the night, and cattle herders used it to drive their herds greater distances as drought shrunk their pastures. Amphetamine dependency went mostly unnoticed at the time, but it had lasting consequences. Stimulants were an anomaly in the broader political economy of postcolonial Africa, and dexamphetamine was a counterpoint to the later history of the cocaine trade from Africa to Europe. In the 1980s, cocaine would flow in the other direction—from Lagos to London—much to the ire of the British government. But for many years, the United Kingdom was not the destination for Nigeria’s illicit drugs—it was their source.