Stephen Ellis
THE international trade in illegal drugs is worth $400-billion a year, according to the United Nations, making it the world’s second-biggest trade after oil. A successful drug-smuggling enterprise, like one of the big South American syndicates, has a bigger annual turnover than half of the world’s governments.
Drug profits on this scale are a new factor in world politics, but drug consumption isn’t. People have always taken drugs for purposes other than medical ones: they have consumed alcohol, marijuana, opium, hallucinogenic plants, coca leaves and many other things to relax, to prepare themselves for battle and to aid religious trance.
Although, in many earlier societies, certain drugs were too expensive for most people’s pockets, and some were taboo on religious grounds, governments before the 20th century did not generally ban particular drugs on moral or health grounds as they now do. The 20th century has seen the general spread of legislation banning certain types of drug – but at the same time, the growth of popular consumption due to reduced transport costs and greater availability. The result is the appearance of a huge illegal market and illegal trade. Since it is illegal, the people who run it are criminals.
This was not always so. The British merchants who conquered large parts of India in the 18th century discovered that one of the most profitable crops was opium, and they used this high-value export to penetrate the massive Chinese market. In fact, when the British took possession of Hong Kong, it was in the context of a war to force the Chinese government of the day to allow British opium exports from India.
The French colonial government in Indochina had an official drug-marketing parastatal, La Rgie Francaise de l’Opium. The Dutch colonial administration introduced coca- growing to Indonesia.
The plain fact is that international drug marketing has been an integral part of the expansion of world trade in modern times.
At the same time, as governments have taken ever-greater powers of social control, they have also taken to themselves the right to control, on the grounds of public health or public morality, what people smoke, sniff, inject, drink or eat.
Perhaps the most important incidence of this in modern times was the decision by the US government in the 1920s to prohibit the consumption of alcohol. It turned out that the desire of the American public to drink alcohol was so great that many otherwise law-abiding citizens ignored the ban. This not only brought the law into disrepute, but put alcohol marketing into the hands of organised criminals. It, in fact, gave birth to the modern American mafia, so that even when the prohibition laws were repealed, organised crime syndicates had developed notably in size and sophistication.
The whole world now faces a similar situation with regard to marijuana, heroin and cocaine in particular. These are the mainstays of the illegal drug trade, and while the possession of marijuana has been decriminalised in some countries, cocaine and heroin trading, possession and consumption by the general public are everywhere illegal.
But consumers in the rich world spend vast amounts of money on these drugs, and in the poor world whole economies are dependent on their production and export. Outlaw governments, like those of Burma and Afghanistan, openly encourage drug production and export and are condemned by Western enforcement agencies which are powerless to stop them. In many more countries – Mexico, Colombia, Turkey, Morocco to name but a few, not to mention Lesotho as well as South Africa’s rural Transkei and KwaZulu-Natal – drug trading and local politics have become closely associated.
Far from abating, there is every indication that the international drug trade is growing in size and that the number of consumers is also growing. In poor countries with major economic problems, including in Africa, more and more people are tempted to grow or trade drugs for the profits they yield.
South Africa is a prime example. It is already a major marijuana producer, and in just a few years has become an important middle-man in heroin and cocaine trafficking. It offers a significant drug market while its transport and banking infrastructure are ideal for South African or international crime syndicates who want to move narcotics from one continent to another.
There seems no prospect of the governments of the world winning the drug war, in spite of their occasional vows to do so. In the meantime, the drug trade is fuelling the development of powerful, international criminal syndicates or mafias at impressive speed.
In the long term the only solution is to legalise the consumption of drugs and at least, in part, to legalise their trade. Consumption and sale could be licensed, as is the case with alcohol. Governments could tax the trade. Farmers in poor countries could perhaps find a new source of income.
In the major consuming countries of Europe and North America there is a growing realisation, on the part of police officers and others who have studied the problem, that they must contemplate some form of legalisation. This would leave them with a major public health problem, but it would be easier to manage if drugs are legal. The situation would be less of a political problem if the marketing of drugs could be taken out of the hands of mafias.
But which country dares start such a process? In the greatest consumer of all, the United States, although headed by a man who once smoked (but did not inhale) marijuana, legalisation remains a political dead issue. In Europe too, any politician who openly advocates legalising drugs risks being savaged by the press.
In the end the public and its elected representatives must make a choice: drugs are harmful to health, but how much more harmful are they to politics?