A ‘narco-state’: No one has the data, so where did Liberian opposition leader Joseph Boakai get figures on drug abuse?

In his speech, Boakai did not provide any evidence for his estimates. When asked for the data, United Party secretary general Amos Tweh promised a response. We'll update this report when he does.

We found the same claim in the first sentence of a press release issued on 4 July 2022 by the Liberian office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN's sexual and reproductive health agency.

We emailed UNFPA Liberia to ask where they got this statistic, but have yet to hear back.

The government ministry responsible for youth affairs has issued the National Youth Policy, which defines young people as those between the ages of 15 and 35.

Narcotics are drugs that dull the senses, relieve pain and cause addiction. They are classified in a global convention signed in 1961, to which Liberia is a party.

The Liberia Drugs Enforcement Agency (LDEA) is the government agency under the justice ministry responsible for combating the use of narcotics and dealing with drug abuse and addiction. 

Michael Jipply, the LDEA's chief of communications and public affairs, told Africa Check there was no publicly available data on drug abuse in Liberia. No study had been conducted in the country, he said.

 “[It] is quite unfortunate that the information you seek from the LDEA right now is not available consistently or accurately,” said Jipply. 

“The LDEA … has not been able to collect accurate and consistent data on the number of drug dependent people in Liberia due to lack of funding and support to assist in the process,” he said. 

We also contacted the Liberian Ministry of Health. A spokesperson said the ministry had no such data. Neither did the country’s statistical agency, the Liberia Institute for Statistics and Geo-Information Services. 

Lack of data makes estimates difficult

Other sources echoed this. A 2022 report by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, a US agency that fights crime and drug trafficking worldwide, noted that while “drug use among the country’s youth was a growing public concern” there was no data.

 “Due to poor transportation and communications infrastructure and a lack of capacity and interest within the Government of Liberia, there is no reliable data on drug consumption or overall trends within Liberia,” the report said. 

Marijuana was the most widely available, along with heroin, cocaine and the synthetic opioid tramadol, according to the report. 

“There are no recent data available on current drug use within Liberia, though anecdotal reports indicate that drug use has increased in the emerging middle class and is common in the expat and Lebanese communities,” the US agency added. 

“Due to a lack of resources and capacity, the government has conducted very little drug prevention, rehabilitation, or treatment since the 1970s (pre-civil war).” 

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the UN's drug control agency, recorded a prevalence of drug use of 7.52% among 15 to 64-year-olds in 2017. Data is not disaggregated for young people between 15 and 35.

Liberia did not submit data to the UN agency until 2022, when it responded to the annual report questionnaire. However, the details of the response are not public.

Given the lack of publicly available data to prove or disprove this claim, we consider it unproven.

Drug addiction refers to a “chronic, relapsing disorder characterised by compulsive drug seeking and use despite adverse consequences” and is “considered a brain disorder, because it involves functional changes to brain circuits involved in reward, stress, and self-control”. That’s according to the US National Institute on Drug Abuse.

This data should have been available from the Liberian authorities. However, as the LDEA, the Ministry of Health and the statistics bureau all said they did not have the data, it is difficult to verify the claim. 

Until the data is available, we again rate the claim as unproven.

This report was written by Wremongar Joe, a reporter at the Centre for Media Studies and Peacebuilding in Liberia, during the 2023 Africa Check Fellowship in Nairobi, Kenya. The fellowship was sponsored by the US Department of State.