Controlling drugs

Mar 18, 2009 Editorial

Roger Khan has confessed that he was shipping drugs to the US: he could be jailed for fifteen years and so join the half a million others incarcerated for drug offences in that country.
If we ever needed it, this was the confirmation that Guyana is now a major transshipment point for drugs into the US. By sheer coincidence, at the same time a meeting of Ministers from fifty-four countries was underway in Vienna at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. That meeting is to decide on a course of action for the next decade.
Back in 1998, the UN General Assembly had unleashed an agenda for achieving a “drug-free world” by the next decade. For good measure, the representatives also committed to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and marijuana.
The aspirational gap between the “drug-free world” and “significantly reducing” supplies, perhaps suggested that they were more realistically hedging their bets.
Last year, reviewing the complete failure in approaching, much less achieving their goals, the Ministers ruefully proposed that 2008 be “a year of reflection”.
What are some of the facts that they might have chewed over? Worldwide, drug use has remained remarkably constant: the few countries that have shown some decreases are more than matched by increases elsewhere – including some locations like Guyana that were previously insignificant.
The UN estimates (that’s all it can do, since by definition an illegal activity is mostly “underground”) that two hundred million drug users worldwide spend approximately US$320 billion to get their “fixes”. The US remains the number one drug destination with the corresponding number one spot for drug users – even though it reportedly spends a whopping US$40 billion annually on their “war on drugs”. Many countries, such as Mexico, are on the verge of becoming “failed states” because of the infiltration of drug lords into governance.
Colombia retains its top billing as a producer of cocaine while over in Asia, with pressure on heroin producers in Turkey and Thailand, production has switched to Myanmar and Afghanistan.
With the mind-boggling profits to be made between the producer states and the top markets which coincide with the top developed states, crackdowns on drug-lords both in producing and transshipment states only result in newer and slicker (not to mention deadlier) ones taking their place.
The rise of Afghanistan as a top-line producer state coincides with the intertwining of drugs and terrorism: the latter thrives on the quick and liquid funds that the former provides.
As one report noted: “The international traffic in illicit drugs contributes to terrorist risk through at least five mechanisms: supplying cash, creating chaos and instability, supporting corruption, providing “cover” and sustaining common infrastructures for illicit activity, and competing for law enforcement and intelligence attention.
Of these, cash and chaos are likely to be the two most important.
So what is to be done? As is usual with problems that involve supply and demand, the countries with the highest demand are in the forefront of defining the issue – and in Vienna they are as divided as they are with their financial crisis.
The declaration they agree to later this week will indicate whether participants still favour a 10-year approach that focuses on enforcement — the ‘‘war on drugs’’ — or on reducing the demand for drugs and the harm they cause.
The Europeans, supported by the Latin American countries, that have borne the brunt of violence of the “war on drugs”, arrived at the meetings with reports in hand that declare the war on drugs ineffective and that a new approach may be needed.
They are leaning towards having the problem of drugs defined as a “public health” issue which could mean an end of prohibition and the ‘war on drugs”.
On the other side, countries such as the United States, China and Russia think the phrase “harm reduction” is too broad, and had it removed from the draft text of the official declaration this week.
This was not a good omen. More than likely, we are likely to see a continuation of the (already failed) “war on drugs”. Will we be given some weapons to fight that war, which has crept upon us?

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