 A major drug dealer was arrested in Lagos, a matter of fact in a church and in a string of operations in Edo state, Ondo, Cardona, Kano and Kogi state, at least 2,504.8 kilograms of diverse illicit drugs were seized from multiple suspects in the past week. Well joining us to take a look at this battle against illicit drugs is the publicity secretary of the NDLA, Mr. Fermi Baba Fermi. Good evening, Mr. Fermi. Good evening. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Tell us more about the war on fake drugs as it stands today. Well what we have at the moment is a balance between the two major plants of the operations of the NDLA, that is in the area of drug supply reduction and drug demand reduction. But basically regarding the arrest and socials, these are all efforts at cutting access to illicit drugs across the country and that is why every week, every day you see quite a lot of seizures and arrests across a different part of the country. And what you have, what you just read in your bulletin, is part of those efforts to mop up illicit drugs and substances across communities all over the country. And this is something that will continue just like the shaman did say in that statement that will continue until the last gram of illicit drug is taken away from the hands of merchants of death because... This thing that can be achieved, Mr. Baba Fermi, can that be achieved? Can that be achieved, what he just said? Absolutely, absolutely. I'm sure with a series of arrests and officials, for us we believe that a gram of illicit drug or substance seized or intercepted is a gram less what is available on the street. As of today, I can tell you we are in the last five, six months, we have seized well over two million kilograms of drugs. That is huge. And we believe that if we had escaped into our streets and communities, they could have done quite a lot of animal damage to the lives of our citizens and the public health. So we believe that intercepting these drugs and sensing them, we're going towards winning the war absolutely. And we believe that our officers are more determined, more than ever before, to make sure that we caught accessibility to these substances. There seems to be a lot of arrests. Okay, good to hear that. There appears to be an increased rate in their arrests of illicit drug dealers recently. Is it that your efforts have been stepped up or will have an increase in this crime in the society? Are more people going into drugs? Basically, an indication that there are concerted efforts to make sure that these drugs are taken away from circulation. That is why you are seeing the arrests and seizures everywhere these days. We have, like I tried to explain, with the coming of General Mara in January, it came with a new map of offensive action. Offensive action in the sense that the NDLA and its operatives would now take the battles to the doctors, to the hideouts of drug barons and the drug, I mean, the barons that sells across the country. So what we do now is to go into the forest and also ambush them on the roads, at the airports, at the seaports. And these have actually been working well for the agency and for the country. So that's why you are seeing this and that is why the level of consciousness about illicit drugs in the country is very high at the moment. Well, I must commend you. But we used to have what I would probably call awareness campaigns against drugs in the past. I don't recall seeing any. I haven't seen any for some time. What's going on with that? It's obviously you probably not have been following. You would have seen that in the recent past, the shareman of the agency has been leading top officials to across the state. I mean, the last state we visited was a good state, where we visited the governor, we visited the paramour ruler of a bad land, a lack of a bad land, and had meetings with all the state-owned civil society organizations, state-based organizations, community-based organizations and all across. And this is going on and we are broadening this scope. Just last week, we had the NABUJA here, a two-day meeting with a special proposed committee of all stakeholders. And the only thing of this is to mobilize them to take the war against drug abuse campaigns to the grassroots, to the community. So that's why I told you earlier that we're trying to balance our work between our efforts to drug demand reduction and also drug supply reduction. We're actually creating a clear balance between the two, creating awareness at the same time, cutting access to these drugs. Well, thank you so much, Mr. Femi, Baba Femi, the publicity secretary of the NDLEA and Kudos, and also Mauricio Elbos. Thank you.