Bangladesh has run multiple declared anti-drug campaigns over the past decade, but two stand out in scale and visibility: the 2018 crackdown (May through August), and a renewed campaign in 2023 that ran with less public fanfare but sustained operational tempo. Both are visible in the BPO record. Reading them together is informative.
The 2018 wave
The May 2018 announcement framed the campaign as a war on methamphetamine ("yaba") trafficking, with the southern border district of Cox's Bazar as a primary geography. Casualties in the BPO record spike sharply in that window. The dataset codes 4,121 national incidents in May–August 2018, with 1,449 killed and 13,484 arrested overall (not just drug-related; the national totals for that window). The drug-enforcement subset is a substantial fraction.
The pattern within incidents is consistent: night-time raids, often described in press accounts as "gunfights" between suspects and police or RAB units, with multiple suspect deaths and no security-services casualties. Human rights organisations questioned the gunfight framing in many specific cases; the BPO desk codes what's reported, with the source URL preserved for re-reading.
The 2023 wave
The 2023 campaign was less publicly announced. The operational pattern, however, is visible in the early-2023 incident record: 2,558 national incidents in the first half of 2023, with 946 killed and 5,506 arrested. The arrest count per drug-enforcement incident is higher than 2018; the kill count per incident is lower. Both shifts are consistent with a more procedurally-constrained operational posture.
What changed
Four observations from the cross-period read:
One. The Cox's Bazar concentration of 2018 diffuses across more districts in 2023. Operations are national but less geographically distinctive.
Two. Arrest counts dominate kill counts in 2023 to a degree they didn't in 2018. Whether this reflects a real change in tactics, a change in reporting language, or a change in coding practice is contestable. The desk has flagged this as a question for re-coding review.
Three. Seizure-amount reporting has improved in 2023 — yaba pill counts, methamphetamine weights, cannabis kilos. This wasn't consistently coded in 2018, so direct seizure comparisons are not in the BPO record.
Four. Custodial deaths in the broader record (a category that overlaps but doesn't coincide with drug- enforcement deaths) sustained a relatively steady baseline across both campaigns. The campaigns added to it, but didn't create the underlying rate.
What the record can't settle
Whether the 2018 or 2023 campaigns reduced drug availability in Bangladesh is not a question the incident record can answer. That requires market data — street prices, seizure weights tracked against demand indicators, treatment-centre admissions. Some of that exists in other ministries and agencies; very little is public. The BPO record tells you what the operational footprint was, not what it produced downstream.