It is little stories that appear in the press -- but which
you never hear anything more about them -- that give the clues as to some
of the big issues that are happening under the surface.
For example, there were two recent stories in the last few months which
intrigued me. One was that a British Navy destroyer had stopped a
speedboat in the Atlantic approaching the country. It was said in the
brief report that it contained US$250 million worth of cocaine (or heroin
or whatever). Nothing of this story ever appeared again. The point about
this it is, of course, that any organisation that can risk that much in
one transit must be quite an enormous one in terms of funds. It must be
as large as any conventional multinational corporation in terms of
turnover.
The second story was of a big gang-bust in London some three or four
months ago in which several houses had been raided. In one of them, three
or four US Treasury Bills amounting to $10 billion were found in addition
to drugs. These, in case, readers don't know, can be paid on demand
without proof of identity. The press report said that the authorities
didn't know whether the bills were genuine or not. Once again, there has
been no news of this since. (Since then there has been a quite separate
case where someone had tried to counterfeit American Treasury bills for a
much lesser amount but these were done very amateurishly and the two
people concerned are now in prison. Plenty of publicity for that
case!)
The drug business is a huge sector of the world economy. I seem to
remember reading somewhere that it is as large as the total food
import-export sector. I really don't know. But, because its dimensions
are unknown, this is one of those subjects that are never mentioned in
the economics text books. (One of the others is the amount of counterfeit
money in the world. One of the clues as to the ridiculousness of both of
these omissions in the text books is given by the fact that the total of
all nations' trade deficit is of the order of US$150 trillion -- an
enormous sum. Of course, one nation's deficit is another nation's surplus
and the so-called world trade accounts should balance out completely --
it should be zero. This can't be explained in terms of cumulative
arithmetical residues from botched currency exchange transactions. One
day, if and when we have a world currency again, it will be possible for
economists to start to tidy-up all these trade deficits and really get to
understand what is going on.)
Back to the subject. The developed world (and the ex-developed world of
Russia and its ex-communist allies) is now in a tightening grip of drug
use. The supply of opiates has been vastly increased lately by the
incompetence of the American intrusion into Afghanistan. The Taliban had
stopped poppy growing previously but the acreage is now greater than ever
before and, as the tribal warlords take over more control in the country,
the acreage will undoubtedly grow further.
But will there be a limit to drug use in the developed world or will it
grow pari passu with the growing numbers of the underclass --
those who live in inner city boroughs and suburban hellholes? I'm
inclined to think that drug use will steadily grow, as indeed the
underclass grows due to the increasing skill divide that is now a feature
of the employment structure of developed countries' economies.
In the following article, Johann Hari opines that drugs must be
de-criminalised. If this were to happen there can be little doubt that a
vast proportion of crime, including the inreasing gun culture, would
decline dramatically. The fly in the ointment is that, as the drug use
has grown, a huge number of jobs -- police, prison warder, lawyers,
social services, and so forth -- have now become dependent on the drugs
culture for their incomes. This is quite apart from the depredations of
corrupt politicians all over the world.
I could write further on the lines that hard drugs are those which are
related to the opiate mechanisms in our brain -- that is, in the same
areas of the frontal lobes that are also involved in
"pleasure-seeking" generally, rather than the satisfaction of
basic needs. The drug culture can thus be regarded as but being at the
extreme edge of the same ordinary consumer culture that saturates us all.
Also, what needs to be discussed at some stage (though not here and now)
is whether the drug culture is a modern form of self-culling by those who
can't take the increasing stresses of modern society and will thus always
be with a proportion of us as the consumer society intensifies (or is
hoped to intensify by the economic growthists)..
Keith Hudson
>>>
THE TRUTH ABOUT DRUGS: PROHIBITION CAN NEVER WORK
Johann Hari
A month ago, the British police boasted that they had smashed the biggest
drugs ring operating on our streets.
Detective Superintendent Sharon Carr declared: "We have knocked out
this network .... The price of cocaine on the street will go
up."
Another police officer explained that this would have a "massive
impact" on the British drugs trade. It was the biggest victory for
the drug prohibitionists in a decade; if their approach is ever going to
work, it is at moments like this.
So, four weeks on, what has the practical effect of this unprecedented
raid been? Are there fewer dealers on the streets? Is cocaine more
expensive? Are addicts beating on the doors of the tiny number of rehab
centres we have?
Ross Hawkins, in an excellent report for BBC Radio 5 Live, discovered
that, "Certainly, in Scotland, Liverpool and Birmingham, there
was no impact on the price at all [or, therefore, on availability, since
price responds to scarcity].... In London, there was a very short-term
impact. It lasted for five or six days, with the price going up by a few
pounds a gram. It was very much a tremor. It was all over in a
week."
I cannot see how anybody can now defend the policy of criminalising
drugs. Tens of thousands of police hours and millions of pounds have been
invested in busting this massive drugs ring -- all to virtually no
effect. Prohibition's biggest success in years amounts to --
nothing. No matter how many police resources are thrown at this problem
-- and the Government has increased them to an unprecedented level --
huge quantities of drugs still get through. All that time and money could
have been spent on catching burglars, rapists and murderers, instead of
running after the fantasy of a drugs-free Britain. You are less safe
because of prohibition.
As Mike Trace, the former Deputy Drugs Tsar and now Chief Executive of
the Blenheim Drugs Project, explains: "It's just too easy to get
fresh drugs into this country. The reality in Europe is the
multiplicity of sources of supply.... If you take one source of supply
out, however big, there are so many other sources of supply that they
fill the gap very quickly."
This country has millions of drug users, and it always will have. Anybody
who denies this -- who thinks prohibition can be effective if only we
work even harder, or throw more money at it -- is deluded.
That much is now obvious; but there is another dimension to this debate
that is too rarely acknowledged. The fantasy-politics of prohibition
harms everybody in Britain, but the further back you travel along the
supply chain, the more damage it does.
The drugs gang that our police ineffectively swatted was supplied with
its heroin and cocaine from Colombia, so let's take a look at what our
policy does in that country.
The biggest industry in Colombia is the drugs trade. Eighty percent of
the world's cocaine originates there -- yet the Government cannot tax or
benefit in any way from this massive indigenous network of businesses.
This is solely due to immense US and European pressure to fall in line
with strict prohibition. No; somebody else benefits entirely -- radical
dissident groups, who use drugs trade profits to buy weapons and
destabilise the entire Colombian state. They are either involved directly
in trafficking themselves, or they charge a "tax" (effectively
a protection-racket fee) on those who do.
The effect of a civil war fuelled almost entirely by the illegal drugs
trade (with a neat sideline in kidnapping) is that two million Colombians
have fled their homes due to the fighting, 35,000 Colombians have been
massacred in the last decade, and 300,000 have been made homeless. All
hopes of building a functional Colombian state have been scuppered and
civil rights have been annihilated.
In the past five years alone, over a million people from the wealthy
middle class have fled the country.
Drugs prohibition does all this. If the Colombian Government could shift
strategy and legalise drugs -- thereby bankrupting the criminal gangs
controlling the trade and constantly attacking the Government -- they
could begin to raise a serious income and take control of their country
as preparation for building a proper democracy.
As if this damage to ordinary Colombians is not bad enough, we then
hammer them even more. As part of America's "Plan Colombia"
(spearheaded by a smirking President, who is widely believed to have
recreationally used cocaine himself), more than 200,000 gallons of
herbicide have been sprayed from the skies on desperate peasant farmers.
The toxins are designed to kill their coca crops, preventing them from
supplying cocaine (and from earning an income -- but who cares about
that?).
They also kill legal crops like banana and corn, devastating developing
economies, and they destroy local ecosystems. Serious concerns have been
raised by doctors that they might even cause cancer when ingested through
the water supply.
And all for what? Thirty years after Richard Nixon launched the "War
on Drugs", heroin and cocaine have never been easier to buy on
British and American streets. This war is about as successful as his
other huge fight -- in Vietnam. Here is one occasion when I can happily
say to George Bush and Tony Blair: you really do have to stop the
war.
The Independent -- 31 October 2003
>>>>
