The International Drugs Trade

Guy Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138973022
• eBook ISBN: 9781135455156
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examines the abuse of drugs in the West and the scope and value of the illegal drugs business, and the failure of the drug enforcement programmes either to curtail the supply of drugs or to persuade users to abandon their habit.

1
The World Pattern: An Overview

The worldwide trade in illicit drugs ranks, after the gross domestic products (GDP) of the United States and Japan, as the world's third-largest economy; it is a global business whose organizers constantly shift their operations so that it cannot be brought under control. An estimate in February 1999 gave the U.S. GDP as $8,108 billion; Japan as $3,973 billion; and the drugs trade as $3,230 billion. This figure was regarded as a mid-range estimate of the value of the trade, which might, in fact, be worth as much as $5,000 billion. Given a trade on this scale, it is unlikely, no matter how great the efforts of drug enforcement agencies, that it can be stopped. There are, quite simply, too many people making profits, too many making a living, and too many seeking the end products of the trade for it to be brought under control.

The difficulty in tracking world drug routes is their volatility. One export-smuggling route becomes too dangerous and is closed down, to be replaced at once by another; later, when police vigilance has been relaxed, an earlier route will be reactivated. The drugs business can be divided into three broad activities: the culture and preparation of the drugs, their transit to markets, and their distribution in the principal markets such as the United States and Europe. According to the 1997 annual report of the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), drug trafficking then equaled 8 percent of all world trade.¹ Nearly 140 million people (2.5 percent of the world's population) smoked marijuana and hashish, 13 million people used cocaine, 8 million used heroin, and another 30 million used such stimulants as amphetamines. The report suggested that efforts at drug seizure led to the interception of about one third of cocaine shipments and no more than 10 to 15 percent of heroin shipments. All these figures, as we shall see, may alter substantially from year to year. Profits, in any case, are so large that they cover the losses represented by all seizures. The problem is beyond the ability of any single government or country to control.

The United States is internationally most active in its efforts to combat the drugs trade and has established Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) offices in more than 70 overseas locations. The United States is also the world's largest market for drugs of all kinds, and the U.S. effort is commensurate with the problem it faces on the home front. During the 1990s the European Union, and Britain in particular, developed into another major market for drugs and, after the United States, Britain probably has the next most active anti-drugs program. Heroin, until very recently, has been the most common Class A drug to be smuggled into Britain, most of it coming from the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran). The drug is routed variously through the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Hungary, with about 10 percent being intercepted en route. By the end of the century, however, cocaine had overtaken heroin as the leading Class A drug entering the British drug market, not least because of a major push by the Colombian cartels.

Programs sponsored by the United States or the United Nations in such countries as Peru, with the aims of destroying coca crops and providing funds for farmers to grow alternative and profitable marketable crops such as wheat, have had indifferent success—not least because farmers have agreed to grow such crops and have then moved elsewhere to grow the more profitable coca leaf as well. The United States has put huge effort into fighting the drugs trade and sometimes appears single-handedly to be waging a world war on the trade—and losing that war. The basic U.S. strategy is to tackle the drugs business as close to the source as possible, and this means persuading countries that are principal sources of drugs, such as Colombia, to cooperate in destroying a trade from which they derive huge profits. The DEA was established in 1973 to replace earlier drug enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control or the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The DEA has two roles: domestic enforcement of federal drug laws and the coordination of U.S. drug investigations abroad. To succeed outside the United States, the DEA must work closely with other foreign law enforcement organizations.

Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru are the principal source countries for cocaine. In the mid-1990s about 200 tonnes (197 tons) of cocaine were exported annually from Colombia. Peru then had approximately 121,000 hectares (300,000 acres) of land producing the coca leaf, with Bolivia expanding its coca production and Ecuador also producing it, though on a smaller scale. The Colombian cartels, Medellin and Cali, were mainly responsible for processing the coca leaf into cocaine in the laboratories they controlled, although by the 1990s Colombia also had about 37,000 hectares (91,000 acres) of land producing the coca leaf. In addition, it was beginning to produce heroin. Despite huge U.S. efforts to persuade Colombia to control and curtail its drug production, by 1996 the coca farmers in Colombia were estimated to be supplying 85 percent of the U.S. market. At U.S. insistence, the Colombian government pursued a crop eradication program, although the coca farmers vigorously opposed its implementation. In the four southern provinces of Colombia, where most of the coca is grown, 50,000 protesters turned out in Puerto Asis to oppose the government program. In addition, the armed forces found themselves fighting left-wing guerrillas who supported the coca farmers. As U.S. pressures mounted, Colombia switched some of its attention to the European market, and especially Britain, in an effort to expand its heroin business. By mid-1996, for example, the Cali cartel boasted that it was smuggling 100 kilograms (221 pounds) of heroin into Britain every month.

Government anti-drugs operations in Peru during 1996 revealed that both army and navy officers were deeply involved in drug smuggling (200 army officers had been prosecuted for smuggling offenses over the previous few years); the increase of activity in Peru followed U.S.-inspired anti-narcotics sweeps in Colombia, which had resulted in substantial hauls of coca paste and refined cocaine. In the early 1990s the Peruvian army had succeeded in bringing an end to the activities of the left-wing Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas. However, the army merely replaced the guerrillas by setting up its own bases in the remote former guerrilla-controlled areas and extracting quotas from the drug lords in return for leaving their coca fields intact. In 1995 Peru, as the leading producer, harvested 186,000 tonnes (183,000 tons) of the coca leaf. Traditionally the Peruvians make the coca paste, which is shipped to Colombia for refining into cocaine; beginning in the mid-1990s, however, the Colombian cartels moved some of their operations into Peru to avoid the escalating U.S.-inspired crackdowns in their own country. Much of the drug smuggling from Peru to Colombia is along the Amazon by speedboats, first to Brazil and then on to Colombia.

In the 1980s Bolivia was largely content to grow the coca leaf and ship it north to Colombia, where it was converted into paste in the laboratories of the cartels. During the 1990s, however, with the decline of the Colombian cartels, Bolivian drug dealers began to make their own cocaine, and by the middle of the decade, Bolivian drug exports were earning $600 million a year, more than the country's legitimate exports, and the figure was rising.

Transit routes for drugs change all the time, and a cocaine assignment for Britain from Colombia, for example, might cross the Atlantic to Lagos in Nigeria and then pass through Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands before reaching its final destination. Panama acts as both a transit country and money-laundering center. Jamaica acts as a transit country for cocaine and cannabis to both the United States and Britain, and Jamaican “yardie” gangs have become an important part of the drug-distribution network in London. The Caribbean islands lie conveniently between the main cocaine source in South America and either the leading world market for the drug, the United States, or the European market. In the 1990s tougher attitudes toward drug trafficking and the closure of cocaine conduits to North America persuaded the South American cartels to extend their operations from Central America and the western Caribbean to the 29 countries of the eastern Caribbean, which stretch from Surinam to the British Virgin Islands. Small islands with minimal infrastructures and tiny economies had no experience and little capacity in dealing with highly sophisticated drug-smuggling operations. Poverty meant that officials were easily open to bribes, and from these islands new routes were opened up for transit to the United States, Britain, and Europe.

The United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP; based in Barbados) reported that 180 tonnes (177 tons) of cocaine, equivalent to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) a day, had been smuggled from South America via the eastern Caribbean into Europe during 1996. Of this amount, 60 percent passed through Britain. It was carried by cargo ships or by couriers on passenger flights. About one fifth of this Europe-bound cocaine traveled with couriers on as many as three air runs of returning vacationers a week. As the director of this UN program, Dr. Sando Calvini, explained, “You squeeze it here and it pops up over there. As their routes have been closed down, the narco-traffickers have been pushed further and further east, so these islands [of the eastern Caribbean] are now beginning to see a lot more drug activity.”²

Despite its tough drug laws, Barbados was dealing with 60 or more drug cases a month starting in the mid-1990s. Other Leeward and Windward islands were drawn into the drugs business, often for money-laundering purposes, with the Internet being widely used to “advise” about operations. These small islands are very vulnerable to takeover as drug-smuggling transit posts; they have weak economies, high unemployment, underpaid and demoralized officials, and only small anti-narcotics budgets available. Such mini-states, which are fearful of being marginalized in the new climate of world economic globalization, may look upon money laundering for the drugs business as a life-saving economic windfall not to be passed over. Cuba, on the other hand, has maintained a strict anti-drugs stand. However, as a consequence of the U.S. blockade, Cuban waters are barred to the U.S. Coast Guard, with the result that drugs are dropped into these waters from the air in watertight packaging and then picked up and taken ashore for shipping to Europe through Cuban ports. Fidel Castro has denounced drug trafficking as against the revolution and, for example, cooperated with British police in order to prevent Cuba from becoming a transit stop for drugs between South America and Europe. Much of the cocaine destined for Europe from South America enters Europe through Portugal and Spain.

Mexico is the most important link country between the drug producers of South America and the North American market. Not only has Mexico long acted as a transit country for drugs from south to north, but it is also itself a growing source of drugs, and the U.S.-Mexican border area has become one of the most active drug-transit regions in the world. Mexico has supplied marijuana to the U.S. market for generations, while in recent years it has become a major producer of heroin. It has the advantage of a long border with the United States that has always been extremely hard to control. During the 1990s Mexico switched from producing cheap, low-grade heroin, which supplied only a small part of the U.S. market, to producing some of the world's most potent heroin. By the late 1990s it was taking over a rapidly increasing share of the U.S. market and, with Colombia, had taken over distribution in the United States from Asian organizations. The Asian share of the U.S. heroin market, meanwhile, dropped after 1992 from 90 percent to only 28 percent. In the United States the incidence of heroin users rose sharply during the 1990s from 500,000 to 600,000. According to U.S. anti-drugs officials, Mexican drug syndicates have taken over many of the cocaine distribution routes that were once dominated by the Colombians and have come to control nearly all heroin sales in the United States west of the Mississippi River. By the late 1990s the DEA estimated that 42 percent of heroin smuggled into the United States originated in Mexico; at the same time, it appeared that Colombian and Mexican drug operators were forming an increasingly close alliance.

On the other side of the world, the Golden Triangle—consisting of Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Thailand—has always been one of the two traditional sources of heroin, with Myanmar as the leading producer country (overtaken in recent years by Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent). Most of the heroin-producing region of Myanmar has been plagued by wars over many years between the Karens and other ethnic groups and between various drug warlords, as well as between these groups and government forces. The government of Myanmar has always been prepared to allow the drugs trade to continue as long as it could obtain a major share of the drug revenues for itself. Neither Laos nor Thailand compete with Myanmar, and Thailand has carried out drug-eradication programs, largely inspired and financed by the United States, with the result that heroin from Thailand now makes a relatively small contribution to total output from the Golden Triangle. Even so, Bangkok is both a transit and money-laundering center.

The 1996 heroin harvest in Myanmar was 2,560 tonnes (2,520 tons), which represented a 9 percent increase over 1995. That year witnessed a deal between the government and the warlord Khun Sa, who, with his 20,000-man army, controlled much of the opium trade. Khun Sa surrendered and went into retirement. He handed over the day-to-day running of his drug fiefdom to Tatmadaw, the military wing of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Consequently, as of 1997, the Myanmar military controlled the taxation of heroin production and subsequently established heroin farms manned by forced labor. So near to legitimacy did the drugs business in Myanmar then become that during the years 1995–1997, four different ethnic groups with their own drug-trafficking armies opened offices and private banks in Rangoon from which, over this period, SLORC borrowed some $500 million. The Myanmar economy is underpinned by the proceeds of drug trafficking and, since the country has obstinately kept itself free of entanglements with the wider world community, the government cannot easily be pressured into changing its policies. (See also chapter 12.)

The second traditional region for the production of the opium poppy for heroin is the Golden Crescent—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey— with Turkey also producing heroin legally for the pharmaceutical industry. Afghanistan has overtaken Myanmar as a source of heroin; its eastern Nangarhar province is responsible for 80 percent of the country's poppy production, with an output of 1,300 tonnes (1,280 tons) of dry opium in 1995. During 1996, heroin-processing laboratories were transferred from Pakistan to areas within the Afghanistan frontier. These have been “fortified” and produce about 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of heroin a day. The then-Taliban government made a show at eradication, and over the years 1994–1996, some 30,000 hectares (74,130 acres) of opium and hashish fields were destroyed; this made little difference to the level of drug production, however. The Khyber Pass has become a two-way conduit for the drugs business: Pakistan supplies weapons for the drug mafias, and these are sent via the pass railway and are paid for with heroin. Production in Afghanistan has been turned into a highly organized and efficient agro-business. Technical advisers help with both crop control and drug production, while workers in the new factories have facemasks to protect them, and some of the producers even offer health insurance to their workers. Thus, in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan the drugs business was turned into a sophisticated capitalist enterprise to meet a growing world demand. Despite a Taliban statement that it would stamp out the drugs business, in 1997 Afghanistan produced 2,800 tonnes (2,760 tons) of opium. Together with Myanmar, it became the largest producer in the world. Little of the drug is consumed in Afghanistan itself; most of it, after refining in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, is moved to Europe through the countries of Central Asia. By 1997 heroin production in Afghanistan had spread into five provinces— Takhar in the north and Laghman, Parvan, Kabul, and Lowgar in the east. According to UN estimates, there are about 50 heroin laboratories operating in the country, which has become the center of the trade in the Golden Crescent. Turkey is the most important transit country for the Golden Crescent. (See also chapter 13.)

Heroin from the Golden Triangle travels by sea to Vladivostok and then is transported overland through Mongolia and the Russian Federation to Europe; the countries of the former Soviet Union have become transit countries for both heroin and cannabis, while Russia itself is also a big consumer. Malaysia, of all Asian countries, has the strictest laws regarding drugs, including flogging for soft-drug offenses and the death penalty for hard-drug offenders. Singapore, with similar tough laws, nevertheless has become a money-laundering center for the trade. Eighteen Chinese provinces are drug importers, and there is a big demand for heroin and other drugs.

Many Central and South Asian countries are involved in the transit trade. These include Bangladesh and India, which is also a hashish-consuming country, and the tier of former Soviet republics—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan—which act principally as transit countries to the European market; some are also involved in the production of cannabis. Following the political upheavals that signaled the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, drug cartels moved into Eastern Europe. A new route for cocaine from South America was established via Russia and then into Poland and southeastern Europe. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has become a principal source of synthetic drugs such as speed, and these are also produced in laboratories in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Latvia, although the major ecstasy producers are still in Western Europe, especially the Netherlands. Lebanon, which has long been in a state of turmoil as a result of the Middle East confrontation between Israel and her neighbors, and which is situated on the western fringe of Asia with access to Africa and Europe, is a producer of heroin and cannabis, a money launderer, and the center of a major distribution system.

During the 1990s a number of African countries were drawn into the international drugs business. These included Nigeria as a major distribution center for cocaine from South America; Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Senegal as producers and distributors of cannabis; and Egypt (Cairo) as a transit center. There is the long-established trade in the narcotic leaf qat from Saudi Arabia to Somalia, and this habit has spread to Kenya. Most important, however, are the roles of Nigeria, South Africa, and Morocco.

Lagos has become a major receiver and subsequent distributor of cocaine from Colombia. Couriers take the drug to London and elsewhere in Europe; or it is routed to the northern Nigerian city of Kano and then sent north to Europe or east to Cairo, which is also a big transit center for drugs en route to Europe, especially to Amsterdam. Although Nigeria has a National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, it has been blacklisted by the United States, with Myanmar, Syria, and Iran, for refusing to cooperate in the fight against drug smuggling. Until 1995 Nigeria was p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The World Pattern: An Overview
• Chapter 2 The Role of the United Nations
• Chapter 3 The Drugs
• Chapter 4 Statistics and Comparisons (Britain)
• Chapter 5 British Attitudes to Drugs
• Chapter 6 The U.S. Drug Scene
• Chapter 7 U.S. Statistics
• Chapter 8 The U.S. Policy of Certification
• Chapter 9 Colombia: Key to the Cocaine Trade
• Chapter 10 Colombia's Neighbors
• Chapter 11 Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico
• Chapter 12 The Golden Triangle
• Chapter 13 The Golden Crescent
• Chapter 14 The Involvement of All Asia
• Chapter 15 The Growing Involvement of Africa
• Chapter 16 Europe
• Chapter 17 Money Laundering
• Chapter 18 The Cannabis Debate
• Chapter 19 Conclusions
• Notes
• Index