Drugman released, Fiji still in drug route

July 04, 2009 04:39:31 PM

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Police have released a man they had detained last month for possession of white powder suspected to be some form of illegal drug.

And they have linked the incident to a possibility that Fiji still figures prominently in international underground drug route.  

Senior Superintendent of Police Waisea Tabakau told FijiLive the man had been questioned and has been released, while investigations into the case are continuing.

Since the man’s arrest mid last month, police have been able to establish that the white powder was a flu drug called Contact NT, an over-the-counter drug used in the manufacture of the narcotic methamphetamine, known on the streets as ‘ice’.

 “We have identified the white powder to be a flu drug called Contact NT, it was bound for New Zealand,” West police spokesperson Wame Bautolu had told Fiji Live two days after the arrest.

Tabakau told FijiLive today that police were still working with foreign intelligence and the International Police in further investigation.  

“We have been monitoring the movement of those suspected drug cases for a while now. They bring in raw materials and use Fiji as a transit point for those raw materials to be taken elsewhere and used in the manufacture of illegal drugs,” Tabakau said.  

Fiji is among countries in the Pacific that are known to be transit points for the illegal drug trade. In a paper last year titled “The Illegal Pacific,” Susan Windybank, a research fellow at Australia's Centre for Independent Study, wrote that the region has “long been a transit point for drug shipments destined for markets in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The drug methamphetamine is not a stranger in Fiji’s drug heist history, with the seizure in 2004 of 5kg of the substance, enough to make another 1,000 kg of ‘ice,’ according to Windybank.

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