IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
RECENTLY A 43-year-old Senegalese national named Amadou Sarr arrived at Tribhuvan International Airport on Qatar Airways flight QR 646, routed from Ethiopia through Doha. Officers from the Narcotics Control Bureau had been tracking his travel pattern. At his hotel in Thamel, they searched his room and found nothing. Then they sent him to hospital for an X-ray. Inside his stomach were 16 plastic-coated cocaine capsules. Five days later two Indian women from South Delhi arrived in Kathmandu specifically to collect the delivery. They were arrested on June 14th. The NCB recovered 1.5 kilograms of cocaine in total. Superintendent of Police Durga Raj Regmi, the bureau’s spokesperson, confirmed the arrests and said investigators were working to uncover the full extent of the international network behind them.
The operation is the latest data point in a trend that has been building for several years. Cocaine seizures in Nepal surged from 11.8 kilograms in fiscal year 2022-23 to more than 30 kilograms in 2023-24, according to an analysis published by myRepublica, a media outlet, in December 2024. A single operation on June 20th 2024, recovered 4.5 kilograms from four foreign nationals of Tanzanian, Bolivian, Venezuelan and Indian nationality: a haul the NCB valued at Rs157.6m (some $1m). In December 2025 two Indian nationals were caught with 3.75 kilograms at Sinamangal; a Thai national caught in the same period had concealed 550 grams inside her body. The numbers are the amounts that were caught. The amounts that were not caught are, by definition, unknown and almost certainly larger.
What the arrest profiles reveal is a supply chain that runs from South America through West Africa—particularly Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania—and into South Asia via Ethiopia and the Gulf. The route is not chosen for Nepal’s sake. It is chosen because Tribhuvan International Airport, handling a fraction of the traffic of Mumbai or Delhi, offers softer scrutiny at a point on the corridor where the drug is headed for India’s larger consumption market. The Indian women arriving to collect from Sarr were not Kathmandu residents. They were couriers on a through-route. But routes leave residue, and some of the cocaine that transits Nepal does not leave.
Kathmandu’s domestic market for cocaine is small as well as expensive and concentrated in a specific social stratum. The city’s growing expatriate community from diplomats and development workers to foreign business executives, along with the wealthiest tier of its domestic upper class, constitute the principal demand. At Rs35m a kilogram wholesale (derived from the NCB’s own valuation of the June 2024 seizure), a single gram at retail costs multiples of Nepal’s daily minimum wage. This is not a drug for the majority of Kathmandu’s 3m or so residents. It is for the fraction of the city that earns in dollars or euros, or whose family wealth insulates them from the arithmetic of a Rs19,550 monthly minimum wage.
The geography of the arrests confirms this. Thamel—Kathmandu’s tourist district, the neighbourhood of boutique hotels, rooftop bars and the city’s most active nightlife—appears repeatedly in cocaine seizure reports. A Bolivian national was recovered with 1.2 kilograms from a hotel in Thamel in 2020. Sarr this month was found at a hotel in the same district. “He was not behaving like other tourists,” inspector Jiwan Niraula of the NCB says after the earlier Bolivian arrest. “His activities were suspicious.” The bureau’s profiling at the airport is calibrated to pick up couriers arriving on West African and South American passports via unusual routing. It is not calibrated to identify the end user meeting them at the hotel three hours later.
Nepal’s drug enforcement has expanded its capacity in recent years and is registering heavy results: 5,110 drug cases and 7,943 arrests in fiscal year 2024-25, up from 4,424 cases and 6,742 arrests the year before. The overall drug user population, estimated by the Ministry of Home Affairs at 156,821 as of mid-April 2024, has grown at some 5% a year since 2012. Cannabis, heroin and pharmaceuticals constitute the bulk of that figure. Cocaine is not yet a mass-market product in Nepal. It is something more specific: a status drug for a narrow demographic that can afford it, in a city that is generating a new tier of visible wealth through remittances, conglomerate profits and the development sector’s dollar-denominated salaries, even as it struggles to build the formal economy that would justify that wealth.
The global context makes the trend easier to understand. Global cocaine production hit a record 3,708 tonnes in 2023, up 34% in a single year, according to the UNODC World Drug Report 2025. When supply expands at that rate, prices fall and traffickers seek new markets and new corridors. A city with a growing affluent class, a busy international airport, a transit corridor towards India’s 1.4bn people and enforcement capacity that is improving but still limited is an attractive destination for both. Nepal is not yet a major cocaine market. It is becoming a more interesting one, and the arrest at a Thamel hotel on June 9th is the most recent illustration of the pace at which the change is happening. ■
