The quiet rise of new drugs in Bangladesh

Rayan (not his real name) is 27 and works at a private firm in Bashundhara. He has used MDMA on roughly a dozen occasions since 2022, mostly at winter parties and events with live music. He has never bought it himself.

The first time was at a rooftop gathering in Baridhara. "It just passed around like it was nothing," he says. "Like someone offering a cigarette." The supply chain is short enough that nobody is exposed. He knows it is illegal. "The people who have it are not the kind of people who get arrested," he says.

This is the landscape that ANM Shakil Newaz, a former officer of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), has been tracking for years. He worked on some of Bangladesh's earliest high-end drug cases before leaving the force — the first magic mushroom seizure, a 12-kilogram ice haul that was the largest in the country at the time, and a fentanyl case. 

When asked what Bangladesh's drug problem actually looks like now, Newaz takes a moment.

"What you are looking at is not actually new," he says. "MDMA, LSD, magic mushrooms, ketamine, fentanyl — I've had successful operations involving all of these. Many were first-ever hauls in Bangladesh a few years ago."

The point he makes is that law enforcement is only beginning to formally document what he and his teams encountered on the ground years earlier. The substances arrived quietly, found their markets, and embedded themselves. By the time official seizure logs acknowledged them, they were already ordinary.

According to the Department of Narcotics Control's (DNC's) own records, 12 new drugs were formally identified in Bangladesh between 2014 and 2026. Ice surfaced in 2019. LSD and DMT arrived the same year. Psilocybin tablets emerged in 2023. MDMA followed in 2025. 

Each entered through specific vectors: international courier services, cross-border smuggling from Myanmar, or diversion from legitimate pharmaceutical supply chains. The DNC's data shows that among youth engaged in illicit drug use, consumption of these synthetic substances is now comparatively higher than that of traditional narcotics like heroin.

A market under the market

For the past two decades, yaba has defined Bangladesh's narcotics story. The methamphetamine–caffeine tablet that crossed the Myanmar border and spread from coastal towns to university dormitories climbed from under 1.3 million pills seized in 2011 to 53 million in 2021. 

The 2018–19 government crackdown, during which hundreds of suspected dealers were killed in RAB and police operations, was built specifically around yaba and its distribution networks.

But underneath that story, a different market was forming.

It was smaller, geographically concentrated, and aimed at a completely different demographic. It ran on Telegram, Bitcoin, and international courier parcels. Its customers were graduates and professionals, children of the elite who held parties in Gulshan and Banani apartments and regarded a gram of MDMA or a square of LSD the same way an earlier generation might have regarded imported whiskey — as a mark of access.

The DNC has identified three primary infiltration vectors for these drugs: international postal services (EMS, standard courier), legitimate pharmaceutical supply chains, and cross-border smuggling networks. The speed and scale at which synthetic drugs have embedded themselves suggests that the routes are well established and difficult to intercept at single checkpoints.

Newaz calls these "elite drugs". 

"In Gulshan and Banani, people use it to 'play cool'," he says. "Like, I have Molly, I'm cool." The market, he adds, is controlled within a closed community. There is no mass distribution, no street-corner selling. Supply is tight, prices are high. The social function of the drug is partly the scarcity itself.

What MDMA does

MDMA floods the brain with serotonin, the neurotransmitter associated with mood and social bonding, while also triggering the release of dopamine and norepinephrine. The result is sustained heightened alertness, warmth toward others, and reduced fear — effects that can last several hours. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have documented its potential as a therapeutic adjunct for PTSD, driving renewed clinical interest in the West even as it remains controlled almost everywhere.

Newaz describes its effects on focus precisely, "It increases the capability of your nerves. If someone is browsing the internet on a specific subject, they can stay on it for seven or eight hours, even a day. For three or four days they are very effective. But after three or four days they need at least two days of sleep because the nervous system collapses."

The crash is well-documented as well. MDMA acutely depletes serotonin reserves. In the days following use, users report fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and depression — a pattern resembling a short, intense amphetamine comedown.

The longer-term risk, less discussed in Dhaka's living rooms, is neurotoxicity. Research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal has found evidence that heavy or repeated MDMA use can damage serotonin-producing neurons, affecting memory and mood regulation in ways that may persist long after use stops. The drug is not as uniformly dangerous in small recreational doses as enforcement rhetoric suggests, but it is not the benign party supplement its reputation implies either.

Newaz mentions a 2022 case involving youth arrested in possession of DMT. Those arrested had attempted to synthesise the drug locally using extracts from the lojjaboti plant and Krishnachura bark. Whether the attempt succeeded remains unknown. The case was never fully documented. But it shows that production infrastructure is no longer exclusively foreign.

LSD and the death that broke it open

The first formal confirmation of LSD in Bangladesh came in 2019. The drug did not receive sustained public attention until May 2021, when Dhaka University student Hafizur Rahman was found near Dhaka Medical College Hospital with a machete wound to his throat — allegedly self-inflicted. Eight days passed before his brother identified the body.

Police investigation revealed that Hafizur had been given LSD by three friends in the Curzon Hall area. He had never taken it before. The investigation led to arrests of students from North South University and Independent University who had been running a supply operation through Facebook groups called 'Apnar Abba' and 'Better Brownie and Beyond'. 

A supplier named 'Tim' had been mailing LSD blotters from the Netherlands. Each blotter cost dealers between Tk800 and Tk1,000; they resold them for Tk3,000 to Tk4,000. The group had over a thousand members.

Newaz caught one of the earlier LSD cases independently. He arrested dealers in Banani in 2022. On LSD's effects, "It affects thinking and memory. Many strange experiences they shared. Users experience either a good trip or a bad trip. For a good trip, they need serene places. The suicide of Hafiz can result from a bad trip."

Science is more complicated. LSD binds primarily to serotonin-2A receptors. Neuroimaging research at Yale describes this as a breakdown of normal functional connectivity between cognitive and sensory brain networks — the mechanism behind hallucinations and the dissolution of the sense of self. Research on long-term personality effects is contested. What researchers agree on: LSD's effects are highly sensitive to context — to what users call "set and setting" — and a bad trip can be severe.

"A bad trip means you are not in control of your feelings," Newaz says. "Your brain catches only negativity. You feel everyone in the world is your enemy. That's why LSD takers go to nature — Bandarban, Cox's Bazar — because it requires a peaceful environment."

The network that brought LSD to Bangladesh remains the one Newaz describes: small groups of upper-income young people, a foreign supplier through encrypted messaging, postal services routing small packages through systems not designed to screen substances measured in micrograms.

Ketamine and the laboratories in Uttara

In March 2026, the Department of Narcotics Control raided a flat in Uttara Sector 10 and arrested three Chinese nationals — Yu Zhe, 36, Li Bin, 59, and Yang Chunsheng, 62. Inside was a makeshift laboratory. The men had been processing liquid ketamine into powder and smuggling it to Sri Lanka inside Bluetooth speakers and sound equipment. Six kilograms of ketamine were recovered, along with digital scales, packaging machinery, and a pen drive suspected of being used for cryptocurrency transactions.

The investigation began with a single parcel intercepted at an international courier office. The package, concealed inside a Bluetooth speaker, contained 50 grams of ketamine. Forensic analysis confirmed the substance and traced the network to the Uttara flat.

Newaz had seen this coming. "The Chinese were setting up labs because of easy availability of generic ketamine medicine in Bangladesh. All they needed was to convert the liquid form into powder form."

The UNODC reported in 2023 that ketamine seizures in East and Southeast Asia had increased 167% in a single year to a record 27.4 tonnes. Crime groups were pairing ketamine with methamphetamine in shipments, pushing both as a package to grow ketamine's footprint in new markets. Bangladesh was among them.

Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic on the WHO list of essential medicines, widely used in surgery. In recreational doses, it produces detachment from body and surroundings — the "k-hole" at high doses, manageable dissociation at lower ones. It has arrived in Bangladesh largely through the same elite circuit carrying MDMA and LSD, though the Uttara operation suggests a more industrialised supply chain with regional export ambitions.

Fentanyl, the invisible threat

Fentanyl has not yet produced a mass casualty event in Bangladesh the way it has in North America, where illicitly manufactured fentanyl mixed into other drugs has driven overdose deaths over 70,000 in a single year in the United States. But Newaz is alert to it in a way that suggests the window of complacency may not remain open.

"I caught the person who was bringing fentanyl mainly from the USA as a normal life-saving drug," he says of a 2022 operation. Fentanyl is roughly 100 times more potent than morphine. It has no visible markers distinguishing it from other powders and can be obtained under the cover of pharmaceutical supply chains.

The UNODC has noted that illicit fentanyl is increasingly being mixed into supplies of heroin, cocaine, and even MDMA globally, often without users' knowledge. Bangladesh has not yet reported confirmed fentanyl-adulterated drug deaths, but the forensic infrastructure required to detect such adulteration — rapid test strips, mass spectrometry at point of seizure — is not yet standard in field operations.

The DNC has identified this detection gap as a critical vulnerability. Field-level screening still relies on basic chemical tests that cannot distinguish novel compounds or identify adulterants. The department acknowledges it is months away from deploying advanced scanning technology at airports and establishing the forensic laboratory needed to analyze seized substances at scale.

Magic mushrooms and the greenhouse in Mohammadpur

Newaz says he caught the first magic mushroom case in Bangladesh. The drug — psilocybin mushroom — was being sold as chocolate. The buyers did not always know what they were eating. The arrest involved two young men taken from Hatirjheel in July 2021. One had been using LSD and DMT since 2019 and contacted a childhood friend living in Canada, who smuggled the first consignment in May 2021. They were selling and using themselves when RAB made the arrest.

Psilocybin binds to the same serotonin-2A receptors as LSD, with shorter duration and gentler onset. In clinical research, it has shown promise for treatment-resistant depression. Bangladesh has no medical use framework. What exists is a small supply chain, encrypted ordering, and consumers in affluent enclaves.

Newaz also describes a "self-claimed Drug Scientist" who converted a rented floor in Mohammadpur into a greenhouse and drug manufacturing facility. Different species of Kush — White Widow, Blueberry C Cake, Afghan Kush — were confiscated. In another 2022 raid in Gulshan, his team found Kush, Hemp, Molly, Fentanyl, Adderall, and travel bags filled with cash: nearly $50,000 and Tk2.4 crore. The drug scientist maintained his own closed group of elites to supply.

The story captures what seizure statistics do not: the social profile of the elite drug market. It is not just young people at parties. Supply chains involve people with resources, connections, and — at several points in the hierarchy — the kind of impunity that comes from institutional protection.

The numbers

DNC data for 2024 and 2025 show yaba seizures jumping nearly 90% — from 22.8 million to 43.5 million pills. Cocaine seizures rose from 13 kilograms in 2023 to 130 kilograms in 2024. Heroin and phensedyl seizures fell 15% and 44% respectively.

The pattern is not a reduction in the drug trade. It is reshuffling: some routes squeezed while others expanded.

The cocaine figure is striking because Bangladesh has a very small domestic market for cocaine. What the seizures indicate is transit — South American products moving through Dhaka en route to Europe and North America, with international syndicates using the country as a waystation.

For the drug market Newaz describes, no reliable seizure data exists at a scale allowing conclusions about volume. Cases appear in DNC records as individual arrests — a student here, a son of an elite there, a Chinese national in an Uttara flat. They do not aggregate into a number conveying the market's size. 

That absence of data is itself a kind of data: enforcement is logging cases at the point of arrest, not mapping a market whose supply chains run through encrypted apps and international postal services not designed to be counted.

What comes next

High-end drugs are not everyman's drugs. The mass market — yaba from Myanmar, phensedyl crossing at Jashore, heroin through Rajshahi — operates by different economics, different social logics, different enforcement pressures. The elite market is something else: smaller, more mobile, harder to see, and in some ways more revealing about how Bangladesh's cities have changed.

The DNC has identified synthetic drugs as the single greatest enforcement challenge for the next five to ten years. The concern is not volume but velocity: designer drugs are easier to synthesize locally, harder to detect chemically, and marketed through social media to youth before enforcement even recognizes they exist. Each new drug cycle — ice, then LSD, then psilocybin, then MDMA — shows the market moving faster than institutional response.

The DNC has announced plans for a dedicated forensic laboratory, a cyber crime unit to monitor online markets, and a money laundering investigation unit. Advanced body scanners are being installed at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport. Joint task forces with customs and civil aviation are being convened. But officials privately acknowledge these institutions will not be operational until 2026-2027 at the earliest.

How fast those institutions become operational — and whether they can adapt as quickly as a network of Telegram groups and international couriers — is not yet known. What is known is that Newaz caught the first magic mushroom case, the first large ice shipment near the capital, a fentanyl case, and LSD in Banani before any of those substances appeared in official reports as a systematic concern.

The enforcement record he is describing is also, in part, an intelligence failure. The substances were there before anyone was looking.