An IISS Strategic Comment:
Could West Africa follow Mexico's path into drugs and gang-fuelled violence? The question sounds alarmist, but has concerned international law-enforcement agencies in recent years, as countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Ghana, Benin and Nigeria have emerged as major transhipment points for the global trade in cocaine and heroin. With the business increasingly a destabilising force in West Africa, G8 ministers meeting in Deauville next week will discuss a new initiative to tackle it.
Link:http://www.iiss.org/publications/str...cocaine-coast/

An indication of the scale of the cocaine trade comes from:
Burkina Faso's customs agency destroys more than 100 tonnes of cocaine every year, but this is believed to represent only a small fraction of the drugs circulating the country.
Burkina Faso is the third least developed countries in the world:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkina_Faso