Opinions - The Changing Dynamics of the Drug Trade

[Expat98]

Last year I posted an article from the Washington Post by Misha Glenny in which he made a convincing case that the War on Drugs has been futile. (Not news to most people here, but remarkable for an article in a mainstream American newspaper such as WaPo.)

He's just had a new book published this month titled, McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers, which is about the effect of globalization on organized crime.

I was just reading some reviews of it and ran across this snippet in which he offers his view that the drug trade is evolving from a model in which organic drugs are produced in developing countries and then shipped to consumer countries to a new model in which synthetic drugs produced within the consumer countries themselves will comprise the bulk of drugs that are consumed.

Originally Posted by Misha Glenny

“By far the biggest part of organized crime now is about exchange across borders,” he tells the Straight. “But Canada is both a consumer and a producer nation [of marijuana]. Most places in the western world, and certainly in the European Union, tend to be just consumer nations.…What is happening in the narcotics trade, which in my opinion is going to have a massive impact on narcotics policy…is that slowly but surely the traditional producer zones of organic narcotics, such as South America and Central and East Asia, will be replaced by the production of narcotics inside the consumer countries. So we’ve seen this with marijuana, but the real takeover is through the production of synthetic drugs.”

This shift, he says, will slash the huge transportation costs involved in running an illegal drug ring, so that the difficulties associated with traditional smuggling “will largely be out of the window”. How then to contain this “boom” he describes as imminent? The answer, Glenny says, is in calling an end to the so-called war on drugs.

“We need to have a very serious debate about this issue in which people can raise the idea of liberalization without being accused of wanting to destroy civilization as we know it,” he says. “The aim of the war on drugs is to reduce consumption in the West and production in the South, in order to minimize harm and damage. It’s meant to do that by making things so difficult for the people involved in the trade that it becomes unsustainable.…That’s what the strategy is. Over a 45-year period since it was reinvigorated by Nixon in the early ’70s, it has achieved the exact opposite of that.

“This is a policy,” he continues, “whose greatest supporters—and I discovered this in Canada and in Colombia—are the people it’s designed to bring down: the big drug dealers who…support the war on drugs because it’s the nature of prohibition that makes their vast profits and ensures that they’re able to go on holiday to the Caribbean every year.”

For this reason, Glenny sees Canada’s ongoing internal debate over whether to relax its drug laws as a chance to undercut the criminal networks that have grown quickly in wealth and influence over the last two decades.

“Narcotics is the single most important revenue stream for organized crime around the world,” he says. “The way that you inflict huge damage on organized crime around the world overnight is by moving towards decriminalization. In Canada, because of the marijuana situation, you could take a lot of money out of the shadow economy by kick-starting the issue of decriminalization or legalization of marijuana.”

Glenny pauses for a moment before adding his proviso. “Of course, were it to happen—and obviously it’s not going to happen under the present government—you would have serious difficulties engaging with the United States,” he says. “So think hard on that one.”