Fiji is among the Pacific island states that are now at the mercy of transnational drug traffickers.
This truth was dissected at the 2025 Fiji Law Society Convention where legal practitioners and legislatures came together to discuss the ongoing challenges faced by law enforcers of these small island states.
A common theme of the discussions was the enforcement challenges that border control agencies continued to face while at the end of the legal spectrum were the state lawyers who noted the growing volume of drugs entering the country.
Fiji Police Force and how Fiji’s drug trade developed
Assistant Police Commissioner (Crime) Mesake Waqa said Fiji’s drug trade was connected to organised criminal groups.
“In Fiji, we have local crime syndicates that normally do violent crimes, and they initially were tied to acts such as robbery with violence and burglary before they moved into dealing drugs,” he said.
“We have deportees from Australia, New Zealand and the United States returning to Fiji and they have set up these local syndicates.
“These deportees have connections to the international networks in these three countries, so they started their own in Fiji.”
He said Fiji started noting the movement of illicit drugs into the country about 13 years ago.
“In 2012, we started detecting methamphetamine in milligrams, then they increased to grams and then now we have them in tonnes.
“That shows how criminal syndicates and organised groups have managed to connect themselves to networks overseas.
“Once these groups became well established, they started connections directly to international cartels that resulted in the 4.1 tonnes of meth that surfaced on our shores.”
He said since then law enforcement agencies have been working with its transnational partners to strengthen its borders.
New Zealand and Australia
NZ High Commission Counsellor (Police) Pacific Region senior liaison officer SP Glyn Rowland put it plainly – since 2017, the drug trade in the Pacific has grown to unimaginable heights.
“Over the last eight years we could have never dreamt that we would see the number of drugs that we see coming through the Pacific right now,” he said.
“It was something we thought would never be possible, to be really honest.”
He said the Pacific, and more specifically Fiji, was in the drug trafficking route from source countries in South America and Asia.
SP Rowland said for many years the region was a transit route until it was not.
“It is often said that a transit route never remains a transit route and Fiji was always a transit route.
“I think over the past eight years from my experience Fiji has gone from a transit route to an established domestic market which is certainly where we don’t want to be.
“It has moved very fast around drugs.”
Dirty money
Adding to this hard truth was Auckland Crown Prosecutor Luke Cunnigham who revealed this billion-dollar industry was fuelling this regional drug trade.
“In New Zealand the price for 0.1 grams of meth for quite a long time has been stable at $NZ100 ($F128), so that means a kilogram at its most broken-down form at street level is worth more than $NZ1million ($F1.28m),” Mr Cunningham said.
“A kilogram in wholesale fluctuates in the market but for the last few years it has been between $90,000 and $180,000 for a kilogram depending on supply.
“A kilogram of meth can be bought from South America, in particular Mexico, for about $NZ5000 ($F6400).
“So, when you think about the profit that can be made, you are buying a product for about $NZ5000 ($F6400). So, when you think about the profit that can be made potentially selling it for $NZ180,000 ($F230,500) at wholesale, and possibly even more, if you decide to break it down.
“Its massive profits that are available on the New Zealand market. You can understand why there is a high incentive for drugs to be pushed through the Pacific and into New Zealand.”
Transnational
Mr Cunningham said the greatest challenge for regional governments, including Fiji, was the transnational aspect of this global illegal trade.
“Organised criminal groups exist for one purpose and that purpose is to make profit wherever they can, whether it is through drugs or other means.
“With traditional policing and enforcement you would have police set up an operation when they become aware of the offending happening, they gather their information and evidence and do things like surveillance, put them together and when they’re ready they make an arrest.
“In doing that, they would try and work their way up the hierarchy because you don’t want to catch the foot soldiers.”
He said this type of traditional policing was affected by the transnational nature of drug trafficking.
“You want to catch the people at the top because that is how you disrupt organised criminal groups.
“With the globalisation and the transnational nature of the groups, they cannot do that anymore because the people at the top, for example, are not in New Zealand, so the police can’t actually go after them.
“So, you can catch as many as you like and lock them up, but there will be another one to take their place.”
Catching drug traffickers
For Fiji in 2025, the ‘person at the top’ was former squash national rep Justin Ho who was successfully prosecuted by the office of the Director Public Prosecutors Drug Unit.
Heading the unit is ODPP deputy director John Rabuku who pointed out Fiji had a lot of work to do when it came to protecting its borders while preparing for the new challenges that prosecutors could soon face.
“What we are going through right now, 99 per cent of the drug cases that we prosecute are prosecuted on the traditional methods of evidence like direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, identification, the drug tests,” he said.
“It has not moved away from the way we prosecute drug cases before. For instance, in the 4.015 tonnes of meth that I did, there was one count of importation and that was based on circumstantial evidence.
“We did not have direct evidence of importation, but we had to string together a whole bunch of evidence to try and convince the judge that indeed the drugs came from overseas and they were not manufactured here.
“What we are seeing in the files are the use of technology by the drug peddlers or by a whole group of people who are involved in the trafficking of drugs.
“The drug traffickers are getting more sophisticated. We are now dealing with cases where half the accused persons are dealt with through the traditional evidence and the other half is all electronic evidence.
“They are talking to each other on different end-to-end encrypted apps which the police have to extract properly in accordance with our cybercrime provisions, and if it is not done properly then we cannot use it.”
He said with digital evidence becoming more prominent in drug cases on the horizon there was a need for capacity-building for all state agencies involved.
“We need to train ourselves more on how digital evidence is presented in courts.
“The police need to be trained more on how they can extract digital evidence and they need more resources in order to do that. Some of the phones that we need to extract data or evidence from are still being sent to Australia through the working partnership between the Australian Federal Police and the Fiji Police.”
For the moment
As state authorities continue to ponder on how best our porous borders could be protected from these criminal entities, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Pacific Regional Anti-Corruption Adviser Marie Pegie Cauchois poignantly highlighted there was more to come.
“We have heard before that Fiji and other island countries are not just transit or highways for drugs, but they are now points of entry and points where they stop,” she said.
“Fiji has always been in the way to those high paying markets which are New Zealand and Australia, and we’ve heard that the number of seizures has been skyrocketing.
“Unfortunately, those seizures mean there are more drugs.”
She said these criminal groups would continue to identify and take advantage of each nation’s vulnerabilities.
“Like the Assistant Commissioner said, they were using networks and the different chronic vulnerabilities like groups that were doing petty crimes like burglary.
“Samoa, Tonga and Fiji are the most affected for the moment and I stress the words ‘for the moment’ because the more vulnerabilities there are in these countries the more affected they will be.
“The vulnerabilities in countries that are addressing this problem could also spill over to other places, and in some countries, they are spilling over. These criminal organised groups are looking at these different vulnerabilities.”
