The Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Mojisola Adeyeye, has made a bold call for the death penalty for drug peddlers, arguing that weak punishments encourage the continued circulation of fake and dangerous medicines.
Speaking on The Morning Brief on Channels Television on Friday, Adeyeye did not mince words as she described the dire consequences of substandard and falsified drugs, particularly for children.
“You don’t need to put a gun to a child’s head to kill them. Just give them bad medicine,” she stated.
Her remarks came after a disturbing discovery: in the same shopping mall, one person sold children’s medicine for ₦13,000, while another sold the same product for ₦3,000. When NAFDAC tested the cheaper version in its Kaduna lab, they found it contained nothing—no active ingredients, just a dangerous placebo masquerading as treatment.
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“That raised an alarm,” Adeyeye said. “So, I want the death penalty.”
Adeyeye lamented that current laws do little to deter criminals profiting from fake drugs. She highlighted the case of a trafficker caught with 225mg of Tramadol—a dangerously high dose that could fry a person’s brain or kill them—yet the maximum penalty was a mere five-year prison sentence or a ₦250,000 fine.
“Who doesn’t know that a person can simply withdraw ₦250,000 from an ATM?” she asked, implying that such lenient fines mean nothing to those running lucrative counterfeit drug operations.
The NAFDAC boss stressed that the agency cannot fight this battle alone, calling on the judiciary and the National Assembly to introduce harsher punishments, including the death penalty, for those found guilty of distributing lethal counterfeit drugs.
“So, our judicial system must be strong enough. We are working with the National Assembly to make our penalties much stiffer. But if you kill a child with bad medicine, you deserve to die”, she declared.