Opium (54 page)

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 place 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.

Perhaps it is society which is looking at drugs in the wrong way. Brian Inglis wrote in his 1974 book,
The Forbidden Game: A Social History of Drugs:

To punish drug takers is like a drunk striking the bleary face it sees in the mirror. Drugs will not be brought under control until society itself changes, enabling men to use them as primitive man did: welcoming the visions they provided not as fantasies, but as intimations of a different, and important, level of reality.

It should also be remembered it is not the drugs themselves but how they are used which is the important point. As Frank Zappa, the rock musician, put it: ‘A drug is neither moral nor immoral – it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary licence to act like an asshole.'

Some believe there is another antiphon. Their response is legalisation, distribution control and taxation. Treat heroin like alcohol: use decriminalisation to bring down the price, distribution control to standardise quality and tax revenue to combat the problem. It is a handsome dream but impractical. One only has to see under-age British children buying cigarettes in corner stores and watch cross-Channel shoppers bringing in over-limit supplies of wine and beer from French supermarkets, or observe American youngsters dodging the under-21 restrictions in a liquor store, to know the concept is flawed.

Where legalisation experiments have been tried, problems have arisen. Amsterdam is an object lesson. All drugs are illegal in the Netherlands, but the sale of certain amounts of soft drugs is tolerated. Over 450 coffee shops in Amsterdam (with others throughout the country) may openly sell cannabis, the idea being to separate soft drug users from contact with the criminal pushers of harder drugs. It is a failure. Amsterdam continues to have a serious and escalating heroin and organised crime problem whilst the Netherlands now has a registered addict population equal to Britain's but in a population a fifth the size. This is hardly surprising for statistics throughout the Western world would show most addicts start on soft drugs and graduate to worse. Another unfortunate result of this has been the development in the Netherlands of a new travel industry,
narco-tourism,
whereby tourists visit a country specifically to obtain drugs which are more readily available than they are at home. Narco-tourism is also increasing elsewhere – for example in Thailand and Vietnam, especially in Cholon, Ho Chi Minh City's Chinatown – and is expected to increase as tourism develops in Third World countries.

New initiatives are being suggested. In 1994, the association of British chief constables, admitting they were losing the war on heroin, demanded a radical government policy change. It was suggested registered addicts receive heroin and other required drugs free on the National Health Service, a royal commission be set up on drug control and a DEA-type national task force be implemented.

At the same time General Raymond Kendall, the head of Interpol, suggested drug use (but not trafficking) should be decriminalised with governments addressing themselves to the reduction of consumption. This may work: if demand on the streets of the West falls off, the trade will wither on the vine. Or, in this case, in the pod. The result of such suggestions is leading to increased redirection of resources towards educating the public as a whole against the physical, social and criminal dangers of drug taking. In the long term, this strategy may work, the culture of drug taking being undermined. Modern anti-drugs information and education campaigns, eschewing a patronising tone, avoid censuring drugs and instead suggest an awareness of what the would-be drug taker is embarking upon: facts not finger-wagging admonishments are considered a more effective deterrent. School-based schemes, such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), which was begun in America but is being tried in other countries, concentrate on social skills such as how to resist peer group pressure.

There have to be short-term strategies as well. The best is to deprive narco-criminals of their narco-money. Others may include the removal of legal obstacles built into the constitutions of many democratic countries, depriving traffickers not only of their incomes but also their rights. Needless to say, civil liberties groups will complain bitterly but the response to such complaint is to ask for an alternative. All that can be hoped for is a modest improvement in the situation in the medium term. There will be no quick victories in the drugs wars.