by Martin Booth
The advantage in this terrible global game lies with the criminal. Just as the traffickers and dealers, the drug barons and smugglers manage to stay one step ahead of the enforcement officers chasing them, so do the laundrymen. They will always find a friendly bank, a compliant accountant, an underpaid official or a receptive lawyer to assist them, for their business is driven by greed, the most difficult of the seven deadly sins to exterminate.
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Bacteria and The $1,000,000 Bathtub
Illicit drugs are a major global commodity, born in the days of empire-building and mercantile expansion, just as were cotton, tea or coffee. Most Western nations, and Britain in particular, bear the responsibility for the early development of the trade: it was they who addicted China for profit and caused the beginning of the spread of opium smoking. In more recent times, the South-east Asian poppy trade of today was created by colonial opium monopolies which used opium as a revenue source. In post-colonial times, Western political interests have just as readily promoted the trade: without the Americans in South-east Asia and Afghanistan and their rabid fear of Communism it is arguable whether or not the Golden Triangle and Crescent would be the major producers they are today.
Not all the criticism may be levelled at governments. Much of the foundations of opiate addiction were due to ignorance, to medical practice, to the social conditions of the time. With no other potent medicines available, who can blame the sick for dosing on opiates, blame American Civil War doctors for their prescribing, blame mothers for calming children? The latter practice, for which we condemn nineteenth-century mothers, continues: today, a paracetamol-based calming liquid is common. Few parents in developed countries have not heard of Calpol or its equivalent: in 1993, 9.04 million bottles of it were sold in Britain alone.
Just as opium was a global commodity in the nineteenth century so is heroin in the twentieth, the trade governed – as is all trade – by supply and demand, the market fluctuating just as it does for cocoa, sugar or tobacco. Traders speculate in it and re-direct stocks to meet market requirements or overcome local market difficulties whilst producers change their purchasing patterns or move their production base to suit trade climates. The only difference between the heroin dealer and the tobacco dealer is that the former is dealing in an illegal commodity, his market difficulties caused by law enforcement officers not supermarket chain managers or his customer. At the bottom line, both are dealing in an addictive substance grown by Third World farmers: indeed, many millions more people are ‘hooked’ on nicotine than heroin.
Today, the battle against the international drugs trade is a complex political, economic, social and cultural dilemma riddled with national interests and concerns. As long as the heroin problem exists, there will be those who seek to apportion blame. Are the poppy-growing nations to blame for providing the raw materials or are the consumer nations for not eradicating it?
For the consumer nation, opiate addiction is a major health threat, a socially destructive, crime-orientated problem which can also undermine economic and even political stability. Yet for the poppy-producing nation, opium is often the only sure means of a secure income for a large part of the population and a primary source of foreign currency for the state. The fight against drugs in one country is an attack on the well-being of another and is but a part of the eternal tussle between the developed and the under-developed nations which exists in everything from wild-life conservation strategies to trade. It might be argued the sending of heroin to the USA is basically no different than the sending of Western tobacco goods (with an acknowledged serious health risk) to South America and (ironically) China in order to make up for financial losses in shrinking home markets, or the active encouragement by Western baby milk companies to boost falling home profits by persuading uneducated African mothers to switch from breast- to bottle-feeding.
Since 1945, some opium producing nations have been piqued by the captious attitude of the West over a problem which they see as essentially domestic: the West, they say, should put their house in order. In saying this, the historical tables are turned: do, they imply, as you suggested to the Emperor of China – that if he did not like his people smoking opium then he should prevent them buying it – and leave the producers alone and go after the importers and dealers. Islamic countries have another specific argument. Allah forbids alcohol but not opium whilst the West forbids opium but permits alcohol: opium should not be banned internationally as this would cut across a socio-religious, cultural aspect of Islamic life. If, the argument goes, the West wishes to internationally ban opium then it should also globally ban alcohol.
Masters of opium – call them warlords, drug barons or international criminals – are regarded differently according to who is looking at them. In Western eyes, Khun Sa is considered an evil purveyor of death yet to some Shan state tribes he has been considered a saviour, a politically motivated nationalist leader who has delivered them from Burmese persecution. Khun Sa himself has declared heroin to be a commodity like any other and that he could not stop his people growing poppies for they would then starve. He drew the analogy of asking Americans to stop growing wheat although he was never slow to point out the opium legacy which Asia inherited from Europeans: the whole heroin business, he said, was a matter of karma. Whatever one may think of him, it has to be admitted Khun Sa has made a valid point.
Over the years, Khun Sa made several offers to destroy his opium crop in return for hundreds of millions of dollars. As recently as 1993, he wrote to President Clinton proposing to cease poppy growing altogether in exchange for international aid to establish alternative livelihoods for his people and agricultural redevelopment of the poppy growing areas. The 8 million people in the Shan states, the letter explained, grow poppies because they have no other way of supporting themselves: he added they would destroy the crops as soon as Burma gave them autonomy.
The Americans read the letter with cynicism: to them, Khun Sa is an iron-fisted international criminal and was not the head of a separatist state struggling for independence. As for the Burmese, they take huge foreign currency earnings from the heroin trade. The US State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report of March 1995 stated: ‘(the) government of Burma continues to treat counter-narcotics efforts as a matter of secondary importance.’ It is a Catch-22 situation.
Most opium producing peasants the world over agree with Khun Sa. Opium is their business, their staple, their only viable income with which to feed and clothe their families. They are merely farmers selling their produce: if people do not want it, they should not buy it. Morality is not a part of their agenda and to preach the evils of opium or heroin to them verges on the insulting. They do not make vast profits from opium and many would willingly grow other, perhaps less labour-intensive and police attention-seeking, crops if they could make the same return from them. Asking them not to grow poppies is like asking a bank manager if he would become a teller once more: no one likes to take a cut in salary. The farmers admit they know drugs kill but what is the alternative – an addict dead from an overdose or a farmer’s family dead from starvation? What is more, for many, opium is as traditional a crop as grapes are to the French or olives to the Italians: they also use it medicinally and, for them, it is a boon. Most heroin addicts are literally half a world away.
To some peasant cultures, opium is more than just a crop. It is a basic part of cultural as well as agricultural life. A good example of this was to be found in Turkey where, until 1972, approximately 90,000 farming families were dependent on poppies, the opium from which formed an integral part of the daily life of their communities. Opium was a valuable cash crop, all parts of the plant being utilised. Being non-perishable, opium was also a means of accruing wealth: peasant families annually set aside a quantity of opium to go towards a son’s bride-price on his marriage whilst other family hoards were used as health insurance, providing a nest-egg against unforeseen hospital bills.
Crop substitution schem
es seem an ideal solution but they are fraught with problems. The replacement crops often produce less income: poppies can grow on unfertilised, non-irrigated and often otherwise agriculturally useless terrain: opium is easily transported and does not deteriorate: the opium market is fairly stable: the harvest is assured of a buyer at a reasonably predictable price. There is no other crop in existence to match such criteria.
Eradication schemes also have to take into account the sociopolitical implications of a prohibition. Remove opium from Southeast Asia and a political cauldron will boil over: the Golden Triangle will become a war zone, Burma and Thailand will surely clash over the disputed territory and China may well be drawn into the fracas whilst millions of hill tribesmen will die and the environment will be destroyed.
To eliminate the poppy, massive economic and cultural aid will have to be spent: the price of reducing addiction in the West is the conservation of Third World peasant farmers. The cost is astronomical. An indication of what would be needed on a global scale can be seen in the 1993 US aid package given to Colombia to fight drugs: in just one year, in just one drug-producing country, the USA gave $73 million in cash and technical aid. And, as with any scheme, there is always the difficulty of implementing it, ensuring the money is spent wisely and not lost to corruption. Even then, poppy eradication in one country does not prevent another from starting up.
Another relevant factor working against international eradication is that some national economies are now almost overwhelmed by the drugs trade. This has coined a new noun – narco-economics. It is argued, with some validity, traffickers make up the world’s most influential special interest group, their economic power such that many poorer countries could not survive without their financial presence. They provide extensive foreign capital income and massive employment opportunities: in Colombia, it is thought 10 per cent of the national work-force is employed in the drugs trade whilst Pablo Escobar was the country’s largest single employer. In over a dozen such countries, drug-generated revenue exceeds government revenue with the inevitable result of a good deal of narco-finance entering the political systems. It is not inconceivable for a crime syndicate to buy a major political party and put it in power, this being a natural progression from the present diversification of drugs money into legitimate business.
One way of dealing with the potential which drugs money has for corruption is the rather mundane idea of paying government officials enough so that they would see little attraction in taking bribes: also, they should be promoted only on merit. In Third World countries, poorly paid officials promoted only through a politician’s patronage have every incentive to accept bribes. Paying such people more will be a much cheaper course of action than, for example, financing crop eradication programmes.
Today, virtually every nation has a drugs problem. It is perhaps the most significant cultural phenomena of the late twentieth century, affected by such diverse factors as the invention of new alkaloids, war or peace, demographic changes in society, adolescent cultural tastes, poverty, droughts and natural disasters, ethnic traditions, politics and disposable income levels. With such a range of causitory elements, anyone may be susceptible to drugs.
This begs the question: what can be done to counteract the problem? Legislation, crop replacement, informal and formal controls, medical advice and detoxification, advertising and educational campaigns, military campaigns and law enforcement have all failed. Prohibition does not work. Indeed, it promotes demand thereby increasing profit margins exacerbating the situation and encouraging organised crime, social destabilisation, violence and vice.
Perhaps one course of action would have been to follow the findings of the British 1895 Royal Commission on Opium in India, which suggested a society left to its own devices with opium eventually maintained an addict equilibrium which was not detrimental to the society as a whole. Addicts were not criminalised, opium was available, the price remained low and those habituated simply fed their habit and continued with their lives unburdened, as today’s addicts are unable to do, by the constant need to search for their next fix and the money to pay for it.
Yet we are now too far along the road to heed this, pressures for strict legislation having irreversibly driven opium onto the wrong side of the law, leading to its replacement by more dangerous and insidious opiates, especially heroin. With opium now beyond the reach of government control and the excise-man, there is no real incentive, other than the moral or political one, to combat the trade. All profits nowadays go to the trafficker and not to the community at large as they did in the days of opium monopolies and taxation. The only money a government sees these days from opium is what is seized in money laundering, the only benefit to the economy at large being what filters through in the corruption of police, customs, military and narcotics bureau officials. This has little actual beneficial effect on the domestic economy for much of the proceeds of corruption finances luxury goods which are usually imported.
International organisations have a vital role to play: on occasion they are successful. Yet more often than not, they are affected by political expediency and treaties are reduced to the lowest common denominator governed by signatories’ vested interests. In the instance of entire administrations being involved in the trade, such as in Laos where it has been suggested military commanders and government officials are involved in opium and where the narcotics trade has become such an integral part of the economy it verges on government policy, international laws and conventions are utterly ineffectual. Even if the government itself is not involved, there have been many examples of individual government officials being involved and, even more, of their families’ involvement: the sons of certain government officials seem especially vulnerable. Moreover, more often than not, national anti-narcotic agencies are primarily concerned with competing with each other to keep their own countries free of drugs. It is a self-defeating exercise, like throwing snails into the next door garden: when they have consumed the neighbour’s vegetables, they will return. It is better to kill the snails.
Some countries do kill the snails. After the Communist take-over in 1949, China went from the status of a major consumer and producer to being opium-free, but there was a price to pay in the form of a totalitarian government which tightly governed every hour of its citizens’ lives. Drugs were eradicated but so too were democracy and civil liberties. Perhaps this is the price the rest of the world must pay to rid itself of heroin and other drugs.
Even this is now unlikely to work for even those countries with draconian narcotics laws have failed to exterminate the problem. Malaysia can pass the death sentence for possession of just 15 grams of heroin. Singapore has the same penalty and 117 people have been executed there since the offence became punishable by death in 1955. All kind and condition of men have been caught: a Nigerian preacher, Sabinus Nkem Okpebie (aka Ibbinije Obasa Nepoleon) was arrested at Singapore’s Changi airport en route from Jakarta to Lagos in 1993 and found to be in possession of two TV sets stuffed with 7.58 kilograms of heroin. He was hanged in May, 1995.
Both Malaysia and Singapore have succeeded in reducing domestic addict numbers but drugs are still smuggled from neighbouring Burma and Thailand. A British man convicted in the Philippines of smuggling 5 kilograms of heroin in 1995 was given a jail sentence of 35 years: he was lucky for the Philippines also execute serious drug offenders. Even Thailand, a producing and major trafficking nation, gives the death penalty for drug offences or at least 25 years’ imprisonment, often much more. In 1993 an Australian, Michael Blake, was detained at Bangkok airport with 4.1 kilograms of heroin. His death sentence was commuted to 40 years’ incarceration after he entered a guilty plea. Saudi Arabia has in recent years executed a growing number of couriers in transit through Jeddah, publicly beheading them. Indeed, so much heroin is currently coming through Saudi Arabia, virtually all of it carried by Pakistani swallowers that beheadings, usually held on Thursday and Friday afternoons have, since the summer of 1995, also taken p
lace on Saturdays and Sundays.
The imprisonment or even the execution of traffickers does not go far towards solving the problem: others spring up ready to take their place. Placing addicts in gaol is similarly ineffective. It does not even necessarily cut them off from their habit. American prisons are notoriously infiltrated with drugs whilst a survey of British gaols in 1994 showed how urban gangs from London, Manchester and Liverpool had amicably monopolised the prison trade between them, making vast profits from heroin which was so highly cut as to barely register on analysis equipment: the British prison price is five times that of the street. Prison also introduces non-addicts to drugs: 60 per cent of convict addicts reported they acquired their addiction whilst in custody.
Prison budgets might be better spent on rehabilitation and treatment, inner city deprived area infrastructure improvements, job training for the unemployed, after-school recreation programmes to keep youngsters off the streets and summer employment to keep them busy in long school vacations, support for single mothers – the list is endless. Yet where such moves have been made, from Los Angeles to London, from Miami to Madrid, they have not achieved much. The problems are too vast, too complex and too deeply rooted in society to be overcome.
It is not just a matter of addressing deprivation or keeping idle hands at work. What really has to be addressed is an ingrained cultural attitude which may accept drugs as harmful but which sees them as a means of kicking against authority, an exciting alternative to a mundane life, a declaration of ethnic or class individuality. In short, drugs make a statement.