Opium (53 page)

Laundry legislation is easily evaded. When the Colombian authorities put a 10 per cent tax on imported cash, the cartels merely shifted their banking operations to Venezuela: when Venezuela brought in controls, banking was moved to Argentina. As throughout the history of opium, when one door closes, the traffickers open another.

Another means of washing ‘dirty' money is to use non-bank-based services, such as money-changers, money transfer organisations like American Express or Western Union, credit-card firms and cheque-encashing companies. The former are much used by traffickers in Mexico, both Mexican and foreign. In every town along the US border there are
casas de cambio
– currency exchange companies. Like Mexican banks, they keep no records, Mexico has no cash transfer controls, no laws aimed at illegal profit-making and no asset seizure legislation. In short, Mexico is a laundryman's paradise. A money laundering scheme uncovered by US Customs agents and the Department of Justice in late 1993 may implicate certain officials in the Mexican Attorney-General's office. The Mexican cartels' influence has spread to the total economy of the nation. Drug barons are using the country's booming tourist industry to launder profits, a development of the laundry business which is growing fast across the world. Billions of dollars are laundered per annum by investing huge sums in beach resorts, financial markets, shopping malls and other commercial enterprises such as Punta Diamante, a resort in the Mexican state of Guerrero which many investigators believe is financed with drug money. The former Dutch colony of Aruba, a Caribbean island resort, is said to be entirely funded and owned by Sicilian mafia interests. Through such legitimate investments, the barons have become integrated into the fabric of society.

A favourite method of cleaning money is by passing it through a casino where it is impossible to prove how much cash a croupier handles during a gaming session. This method was much favoured by the Mafia who had and, to some extent, retain an interest in Las Vegas. Nevada's casinos still being exempt from Federal Currency Transaction reporting makes them very valuable laundries. Although Vegas is still a favourite spot, Macau is even more so. Only 45 miles from Hong Kong and served by high-speed ferries every fifteen minutes, it is an ideal laundromat for over 80 per cent of its revenue comes from a massive gambling monopoly providing superb money-cleaning facilities. It is said up to $2 billion may be laundered monthly. In addition, there is a small but very active Russian gangster element now operating in the enclave. Quite what will happen here in 1997 and 1999, when Hong Kong and Macau respectively revert to Chinese sovereignty, remains to be seen.

Throughout the world, banks claim they have an obligatory client confidentiality responsibility. In truth, they have not. Many countries have removed it. However, lawyer/client confidentiality has not been addressed and civil liberties groups are against the undermining of this right. Therefore, lawyers often hold funds for their trafficker clients, hiding them under the cloak of privileged information.

Laundrymen are always on the look-out for private bankers, secretive financial institutions, countries which turn a blind eye to financial transaction or which might even encourage the importation of ‘dirty' money. The former Yugoslavia, for example, contains a number of private banks which offer higher than average interest rates on hard currency deposits. A number of these are secretively owned by prominent Serbian politicians who used profits from laundered heroin money to fund the war against the Bosnian Muslims who, without such financial backing, were comparatively ill-equipped. The private banks laundered their money through shell companies in Austria, regardless of the UN-imposed sanctions against Serbia: with sanctions lifted it will no doubt be business as usual.

Provision exists in Pakistan to hit heroin traders hard. The Forfeiture of Assets Act (1985) allows for confiscation of property and money. However, banks in Pakistan readily take in huge deposits without question, the financial sector protected by a presidential decree (instigated by President Zia) guaranteeing secrecy. Billions of dollars have flowed through Pakistan since the decree with an underground, highly secretive private bank network existing with ‘offices' in Kashmir, the Punjab and London which handles heroin finances coming out of Pakistan.

Former Eastern bloc countries, where hard currency is much sought after, are also now awash with dirty money. Banks, ungoverned by restrictions, readily accept foreign currency without demur. Colombian and Turkish drug barons frequently bank in Bucharest and Sofia, though where the latter is concerned, this is of course not new.

American criticism of international banking is loud and pointed. The US State Department has openly attacked the Bahamas for laundering cocaine and marijuana money, Panama for cocaine finances and Hong Kong for being the Pacific Rim centre of Golden Triangle heroin profit washing. Yet, despite their indignation, the USA does not have a squeaky clean record in this field of activity. The CIA has admitted involvement with a money laundry known as the Shakarchi Trading Company which had handled both Kintex and Globus transactions as well as acting for the Mafia in Sicily. The owner of the company, Mohammed Shakarchi, declared his firm had cleaned $25 million for the CIA between 1981 and 1988, which was used to support Mujaheddin insurgents fighting the Russian occupation army in Afghanistan.

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.

16

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 schemes 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.