There’s more than one way to skin a cat

The description below is nothing particularly new, it’s from an article in NorthJersey.com about how Newark Aiport is increasingly popular as a hub airport for traffickers moving heroin and cocaine from Central America to Europe. As you’re reading, just ask yourself this: Is this really the best way we have of stopping children from taking drugs? Isn’t there a simpler way? You know, like maybe regulating the sale in shops here in the US?

Three federal law enforcement agencies share responsibility for interdicting and investigating drug smuggling at the airports: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the front-line defenders who “sniff out” the couriers; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations directorate, which takes over the investigations; and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which manages a national drug intelligence program aimed at taking down domestic and international drug organizations.

When couriers are caught, the game plan is to quickly flip them and get them to turn in the people who were to pick up the drugs in the hope of developing leads that could eventually dismantle a network.

Within minutes of agreeing to cooperate, a courier is often deployed in a “controlled delivery” that results in additional arrests in the arrivals terminal or the airport parking lot.

“The courier is a great help, but most often the courier doesn’t have all the information on who the ultimate receiver is going to be,” said Mark Witzal, a deputy special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations in New York.

“Everything is very compartmentalized. They only know enough of what they need to get into the country and then where they need to go,” Witzal said. “It’s for us to build a case using the information that we can get from a cooperator, be it a courier, information we might get from other sources, and also through a lot of different investigative techniques.”

“It’s a daunting task,” Witzal said. “Investigations are multiyear in scope. To take out, disrupt and dismantle an organization, it takes a significant amount of time.

Clearly, the purpose of the government’s drug strategy isn’t just to stop children from taking drugs, it’s to stop everyone from taking drugs. Sometimes,  I think we all just need to look at that and ask why?  Why is it so important to so many people that I don’t put this particular substance in my body?

“We have to give them back their names, their history”

Javier Sicilia erects the first of the names of the victims of Mexico's drug war (Photo from The Field: Al Giordano)

Javier Sicilia, who made the call for Mexicans to take to the streets last week in protest against Mexico’s continuing war on drugs, this week is asking people to remember the names of drug war victims in cities across Mexico.

Al Giordano writes:

Javier Sicilia today called on citizens throughout Mexico to erect such plaques on every municipal and state government hall on every town and city square, so that the 40,000 Mexicans killed in Calderón’s war will not be forgotten. “We have to give them back their names, their history, and also to their families who have been criminalized. At every Zócalo, put up their names, put up a plaque, so that their deaths will never be repeated.”

A story in the Washington Post last week drew attention to the number of children who are victims of violence in Mexico (1,180 in 2009). According to the DEA, “the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,”

I seriously hope the civil protests in Mexico can change the frame of this debate, because I don’t know what else will.  Unfortunate???? Cocktards.

Source: Narcosphere: Narco News- The Field, The Washington Post

Thanks Jamie!

Drug money

I don’t like to think of myself as naive, especially when it comes to drugs, but every now and then I read something that shocks me. This week I was hit with a double whammy- an article in the Guardian about Wachovia’s complicity in the laundering of Mexican drug money, and a Wall Street Journal article about an extradition fight between the US and Venezuela for a drugs kingpin- Walid ‘the Turk’ Makled.

In the constant drip drip in the news of a $1mn bust here, and a $500,000 seizure there, I guess I must have lost sight of how much drugs money is actually sloshing around in the system. Wachovia bank was recently fined $110mn for

failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn… into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business

That’s not to say that all of the money was dirty, or even that all of it was drugs money. But some of it definitely was:

“On numerous occasions,” say the court papers, “monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug-trafficking organisation. Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug-trafficking organisations.” … “nearly $13m went through correspondent bank accounts at Wachovia for the purchase of aircraft to be used in the illegal narcotics trade. From these aircraft, more than 20,000kg of cocaine were seized.”

$378.4bn!!! The article equates the money to a third of Mexico’s GDP. The Information is Beautiful Site has a helpful guide for visualizing what a billion dollars looks like.

$378.4bn is more than all of Africa’s debt to the West, but less than it would cost to feed every child on Earth for five years. Why are we leaving this money, untaxed, in the hands of criminals?  Why are we letting it finance wars, and corruption, and violence, and murder?  What the fuck are we playing at? The $110mn fine that Wachovia paid is about 0.02% of that amount.

Speaking of wars and corruption leads me to the second story of the week to leave me open-mouthed as I read. The US and Venezuela are currently in a tussle over the extradition of “a king among kingpins” currently held in a Colombian jail. According to US officials:

At the height of his power, Mr Makled…smuggled 10 tons of cocaine a month into the US from Venezuela…He controlled Venezuela’s most important port and allegedly added to his transport empire by, in effect, stealing an entire airline…

I’m sorry…did you say airline?

“In 2008, Mr Makled bought a controlling interest in Aeropostal SA, then the country’s largest privately owned airline.”

He also “operated about half the warehouses and loading docks in Puerto Cabello”, Venezuela’s largest port. The DEA implicates top Venezuelan government officials in Makled’s operation, and in one interview to Colombian television, Makled said “If I’m a drug dealer, then all of them are drug dealers too.”

Oh, and by the way- 1o tons of cocaine? That’s 9,071,840 grams. A month.

So…there we have it. The two stories that made me question my naivety this weekend. Beyond befuzzled. This week I am flabbergasted.

Who grows which drugs and why

From Innocent Bystanders, a review of global drug production by Peter Reuter offers an interesting perspective on why most cannabis is grown in the countries it is consumed in, whereas opium and coca are produced elsewhere despite the associated costs of smuggling.  According to the UNODC, Bolivia, Columbia and Peru account for the entirety of commercial coca production, and in 1994, Afghanistan and Myanmar accounted for more than 90% of global opium production.  However, the picture for cannabis production is very different.  The Canadian market is now considered self-sufficient, in the US more than 50% of the cannabis is domestically produced, whilst  The Netherlands accounts for a large share of the cannabis in Europe.  The reason cannabis production is different?

• the bulkiness per unit value raises smuggling costs substantially
• the high dollar yield per acre reduces risks of detection per dollar of production
• there is a ’boutique’ market of users and growers interested in developing better breeds of the plant, and many users ‘grow their own’
• entry into the market is easy, because the seeds are widely available.  There are limited economies of scale in growing beyond a few plants, and no further processing is required.

How clean is your nose?

Several years ago, I visited the coca museum in Bolivia. It’s a small museum with a compelling story, a detailed history of the use of coca by the indigenous peoples, and the impact of the cocaine trade on Bolivian society. It includes recreations of the different stages of cocaine production. The museum effectively strips away any glamor that might be associated with the drug.

Back in 2006, the UK’s metropolitan police chief railed against the hypocrisy of middle class drug users who drink fair trade coffee but buy cocaine. Alex James’ documentary in 2008 tried to deliver the same message. However, 2.4% of adults in Britain reported using cocaine in the past year, and it’s the second most popular (illegal) drug in the UK, after cannabis.

Bruce Parry’s Amazon series on the BBC saw him spending time with cocaine producers as they bleached the coca leaves to extract the paste, pouring bleach and petrol into the rainforest’s rivers in the process. A recent Economist article describes how the violence of the trade in Colombia and Mexico is spreading to the Central American countries sandwiched between them. There are more deaths from violent crime in Guatemala now than there were during the civil war, and the fragile institutions of the police and the courts are struggling to stay functional with the increasing sway of corruption throughout the system.

Clearly, Central America’s problems are exacerbated by the illegality of the trade. The violence, the environmental toxicity, the corruption and the poverty are all a result of  prohibition. A recent study concluded that for every $1 spent on development in Mexico, $10 leaves the country in the form of ‘illicit outflows‘-the cross-border movement of money that is illegally earned, transferred, or utilized.

Some level of exploitation is unavoidable with regards to trade in developing countries. Whether it’s child labor in textile production in India, environmental degradation through  coffee production in Africa, or the toxic working environment for those manufacturing the i phone in China, there are societal costs. But regulation can reduce the harm. With an illegal trade, there is no recourse to regulation.

For the consumer countries, there’s no shift in the official position. Should Bolivia’s amendment to the UN regulations regarding coca leaf be successful, it will right a blatant discrimination, but it won’t address any of the problems that arise from cocaine production itself. The US and the UK offer increased financial and technical assistance to ‘combat’ the trade, and cling doggedly to the idea that more guns, more agents, more resources can eradicate cocaine production*.  Meanwhile factories burrow deeper into the rainforest to evade detection, and trade routes open up on the West African coast as the Caribbean becomes a more hostile trading environment.

While the drug war continues, I think the consumer has to take responsibility. While cocaine remains a drug of choice, maybe users should  off-set their costs, in the way that eco-warriors assuage the guilt of plane travel by planting trees. For every £or $ spent on coke,  a donation to Transform, or Release, or the Drug Policy Alliance or Human Rights Watch. Either that, or quit. Cocaine is not fair trade, and it’s a hypocrisy to ignore the social, economic and environmental costs of a line.

 

 

*until they retire, of course