Kenya has become a major player in the continent’s illicit drug trafficking economy, with industrial-scale methamphetamine production, widespread cannabis cultivation, and an emerging threat of synthetic opioids, even as cocaine floods in from Latin America.
- •A new report by the Eastern and Southern Africa Commission on Drugs (ESACD) reveals that over the past five years, methamphetamine, once considered a localized threat in South Africa, has taken root in Kenya’s underworld.
- •Clandestine labs, suspected in Nairobi’s industrial zones and coastal hideouts, are now part of a wider East and Southern Africa (ESA) manufacturing corridor stretching from South Africa to Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
- •Meth, or “crystal”, arrives in Kenyan communities as a cheaper, more intense substitute for crack cocaine, with consumer bases now reported in informal settlements across Nairobi, Kisumu, and Mombasa.
“The growth in the use of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine can be seen as a consequence of the region’s urban development inadequacies. The drug’s regional proliferation flows from policies and environments of inequitable, unsustainable development, and it is quickly occupying the deteriorating spaces of the growing number of marginalized and victimized communities facing limited opportunities for licit socio-economic prosperity,” the report stated.
Evidence of local meth production in the region points to increased flow of precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and red phosphorus from India and China, often arriving in disguised shipments via Mombasa Port or Nairobi’s air freight terminals. Nigerian supply networks have transformed into dominant players, controlling a continent-wide meth economy.
Since 2016, methamphetamine purity and availability in ESA has increased dramatically, as Kenya has become a transit hub feeding inland markets in Uganda, Zambia and the Great Lakes region.
Even more ominous is the rising presence of synthetic opioids. Although Kenya has so far avoided the type of fentanyl-led overdose epidemic seen in North America, regional forensic laboratories have begun to detect nitazenes, a family of powerful synthetic opioids from China in neighbouring island states. In 2024, South Africa reported its first verified case of fentanyl presence in heroin street samples.
Kenyan heroin markets, already under strain from disruptions in Afghan production (after the Taliban takeover), risk contamination with synthetic adulterants as traffickers scramble to maintain potency.
“In most countries of the region, there is no reliable determination of some of the basic marketplace denominators needed to assess a drug market, the harms it is creating or the relative effectiveness of measures put in place to address these. In the absence of such basic information, it is not possible to mount an effective national response to illicit drug markets or to measure the effects of such a response,” the report added.
The heroin crisis, once confined to Mombasa’s beaches, now reaches into Nairobi’s alleyways and Kisumu’s lakeside corridors. Injection drug use (IDU), a rarity two decades ago, now accounts for up to half of heroin consumption in certain communities. This rapid shift from inhalation to injection, largely triggered by the temporary appearance of purer Southeast Asian heroin in the early 2000s, has dramatically raised the stakes in a country already facing overstretched public health systems.
“Secondary and tertiary towns and settlements now have their own vibrant retail drug markets, particularly for substances such as heroin and crack cocaine. Poly drug use has become the norm in most regional markets, while IDU, with its links to HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission, has permeated the entire region,” the ESACD report noted.
The Popular…But Still Illegal Herb
Meanwhile, cannabis remains Kenya’s most resilient and widespread drug crop. Cultivated in every county, especially in inaccessible highland and forested areas, the plant has become both a subsistence crop and a commercial product.
Kenya, alongside Uganda, Malawi, and Tanzania, is classified as a regional supply pillar in what has become a self-sustaining cannabis economy. Even as eradication campaigns continue, enforcement success remains marginal.
Despite prohibitionist laws, cannabis cultivation thrives, sometimes just kilometres from law enforcement posts. As South Africa legalizes cannabis for medical and recreational use, pressure is mounting on Kenya to revise its own policies, a move that could disrupt both the illicit and semi-licit cultivation zones currently fueling black market supply in the region and even European markets.
“Cannabis has always been a curious drug for enforcement. While being ‘de jure’ illegal in all countries, in many it was treated as de facto legal or, at the very least, as less consequential than what were perceived to be the ‘harder’ substances – cocaine, heroin, synthetics. In its work to date the Commission has convened regional discussions in Maputo and Gaborone on the nature of cannabis legalization,” the report said.
The Persistent Powder
While most cocaine shipments are still bound for Europe and Asia, a growing portion is staying behind in Kenya. Once trafficked solely through the Port of Mombasa, cocaine now arrives via air and land as well by being tucked inside cargo flights, tourist luggage, or embedded in long-haul trucking routes. The country’s position as a coastal state with sophisticated logistics but corrupt government agencies has allowed traffickers to embed cocaine flows into commercial routes with astonishing success.
The cocaine market is also evolving as crack cocaine has overtaken powder as the stimulant of choice among lower-income consumers in Nairobi and Kisumu. At the same time, affluent urban circles have become key powder cocaine markets, fueling nightlife economies and drawing traffickers deeper into the city’s social fabric.
With the synthetic opioid frontier now open and the meth industry scaling up, the Eastern and Southern Africa Commission on Drugs warns that Kenya’s role in the continent’s drug economy is no longer peripheral.
