The crystal meth drug trade along the ‘Pacific drug highway’ is spreading the addiction to the villages of Fiji

It is Manar Ravouvou’s job to protect his village.

As ‘headman’ of his home on the outskirts of Lautoka, just north of Fiji’s tourist centre Nadi, he checks in visitors and ensures his community is clean and tidy.

But lately he’s been dealing with much bigger problems.

“We found the needle just one or two metres from the village,” Mr Ravouvou told the ABC.

“The drugs damage the minds of our children… and then they have no future.

“That’s why we do everything we can to protect our village from drugs.”

Mr. Ravouvou is not alone.

Across Fiji, once peaceful, innocent villages and towns are facing a new threat: methamphetamine.

There is a national crisis with drug-related deaths on the rise, both from addiction and suspected gang activity.

Experts report that methamphetamine use is occurring in children as young as 10 years old, with use occurring primarily in teens and young adults.

In the villages of Fiji, where such an addiction has never occurred before, they are at a loss.

“It is very sad for our communities,” Fiji’s Home Affairs Minister Pio Tikoduadua told the ABC.

“It has a huge impact on our children, our youth. We fear for their future.

“Because we are small, even the smallness of our (drug) problem is really big for Fiji. I don’t want it to be trivialized, we want to be honest about it.

And the problem starts 10,000 kilometers away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

‘Whatever it takes’

For Fiji, its location in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, with its crystal clear blue waters and pristine reefs, is one of the reasons it is so attractive to the almost half a million Australian tourists who visit each year.

But nowadays it has become a major vulnerable point.

From Mexico and America, drug cartels target the isolated ports of Fiji and the neighbouring island states of Samoa and Tonga to import huge quantities of methamphetamine and cocaine.

The ports, where border controls are often under-resourced and lack basic detection technologies, are then used as transit points to smuggle drugs to the lucrative markets of Australia and New Zealand.

It’s been called the Pacific “drug highway.”

And now the product is inevitably trickling down to local communities in Fiji, like Mr Ravouvou’s.

Earlier this year, Fiji’s problem came into the international spotlight.

In one of the largest drug busts ever, 5.25 tonnes of methamphetamine were found in two houses in Fiji. Both houses are just a five-minute drive from Nadi International Airport.

The market value of methamphetamine was approximately $2 billion.

The supply was so large that neighbors of one of the houses thought the drug dealers were merely moving rocks or building materials.

Police have now charged 13 people. According to insiders involved in the case, ABC police only discovered the meth after a chance arrest of someone who was trying to distribute a small amount of the drug locally.

According to the ABC, prosecutors are investigating those involved’ ties to cartels around the world, as the product is said to have been smuggled into the Australian market after arriving in Fiji via barge.

For Fiji Navy Commander Commodore Humphrey Tawake, the bust is just a drop in the ocean, given suspicions of high activity in the Pacific waters.

“They have the capacity and the money to do it.”

He said private yachts, often owned by Australians, were used to transport the drugs, with the boats disabling their navigation systems to avoid detection.

“It’s a challenge,” he said. “We have to monitor 1.3 million square kilometers of ocean.

“We follow the ships, (and) their routes are well established, but they (the drug smugglers) change them. They are so clever in how they do it, but we have to be ahead of the game (and) we have to think like them and we have to have the right resources and we have to have the right information at the right time.

“I think we can do better.”

Captain Tawake said they needed more resources on the water to seriously tackle the smuggling activities.

“We would be much more effective if we had that view of the sea,” he said.

“It’s one thing to have this technology, but it’s another thing to be visible.”

However, Fiji’s navy suffered a major setback in June when one of its two Australian-donated patrol boats, the RFNS Paumau, ran aground on its maiden voyage.

The aircraft has been out of service since the incident and is still being assessed for possible repairs, if it can be saved at all.

‘Children are given injections’

According to local police, the back streets of Suva, the capital of Fiji, are increasingly busy with the fight against what they call ‘white drugs’.

The local police took the ABC for a ride at night so they could see for themselves what they were dealing with.

On her usual patrol route, Suva police officer Elenoa Digitaki points to an inconspicuous bus stop near Fiji’s National Parliament Building.

Later, during a walk along Suva’s waterfront, she points out two more spots where users frequent, both open-air and just metres from the CBD.

“This is where they go,” she said. “We see it all the time.”

Aporosa Lutunauga, Assistant Commissioner of Fiji Police, says there have been major changes over the past decade.

“It used to be all about green drugs,” he says.

“That was then. Things have changed.

“Now we face a major challenge: we have to fight this new threat that is threatening us: white drugs.

“We’re not a narcotics state. We’re not, let’s say, Philadelphia. We’re not Chicago. We’re not there yet. But we’ve got to have all hands on deck to fight this.”

Fiji’s Minister of Home Affairs, Pio Tikoduadua, says all of this contributes to a critical conversation that Fiji needs to have.

“The question is, how do we stop this? How do we save our children? How do we eliminate drugs from our communities?

“It gives me hope that the community will rise up to address this problem and save their children.”