News of the record drugs haul off Co Cork last month barely registered in Colombia, the country that was reportedly the origin of the cocaine. The omission is understandable. As the world’s biggest cocaine exporter, Colombian media would be swamped trying to cover properly all the apprehensions abroad of its most notorious national product, the result of law enforcement operations that have done nothing to hinder the South American country’s world-leading cocaine industry.
Authorities have been setting records across Europe this summer, not just in Ireland. The 2.2 tonne haul on the MV Matthew was less than half the new Italian record of 5.3 tonnes set in July, which was itself dwarfed by the 8.3-tonne load seized in Rotterdam the same month and the 9.5 tonnes discovered in a container in the Spanish port of Algeciras in August. Meanwhile, during the first six months of the year 43.4 tonnes were caught trying to enter the port of Antwerp, which vies for the title of Europe’s principal cocaine hub as the UN warns the North Sea is increasingly replacing traditional entry points in Spain and Portugal for cocaine arriving in Europe.
Though authorities present such seizures as a measure of their success in combating drug trafficking, critics of the decades-old war on drugs, declared by then US president Richard Nixon in 1971, say they should not distract from the overall failure of prohibition, as measured by greater than ever availability, historically low prices and higher addiction rates in Ireland and globally.
Futile strategy
“I’m sure the operation in Ireland involved a lot of work and risk to people’s lives. But you have to take a broader view where you can see it will potentially only have a very limited short-term positive impact and does nothing to change the long-term futility of the current strategy. Despite the policy of prohibition and interdiction, all we see is the price of cocaine has dropped and dropped over the decades,” said David Borden, executive director of Stop the War on Drugs, a US organisation that campaigns for reform of global drug policy.
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Drug trafficking organisations have long built into their business calculations the risk of seizures and other enforcement operations targeting them. One means of doing so is to relentlessly boost production to ensure seizures like the one off Co Cork have negligible impact on supply. Colombia alone is now estimated by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to produce more than 1,700 tonnes of cocaine annually, out of a global total of about 2,000 tonnes. It is a remarkable display of resilience by an industry that was the target of a years-long, multibillion-dollar eradication effort bankrolled by the United States.
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As well as boosting supply traffickers have also diversified their sources. Cultivation of the coca leaf, the key ingredient in cocaine, has in recent years spread to previously non-producer countries like Ecuador, Venezuela and even into Central America. The resulting records set in global production mean there is now more cocaine than ever before to pump into an increasingly diversified global distribution network, another countermeasure taken by traffickers to evade the efforts of law enforcement.
This strategy has the added benefit of expanding the industry’s horizons, transshipment hubs typically developing into lucrative new markets. Once a marginal consumer country, cocaine consumption has boomed in Brazil at the same time as the country has emerged as a major transshipment hub. The pattern is now repeating itself in African nations that are emerging hubs for cocaine coming through Brazil on its way to Europe and rapidly expanding new markets in Asia.
Global footprint
Thus, critics of the drugs war say the record seizures of recent years only reflect this growing global footprint of the cocaine trade, rather than any success in defeating it. “The enforcement pressures do have consequences because it forces trafficking organisations to be more nimble, to shift around but also to be more ruthless. Enforcement tends to make the drug trade expand and tends to make it more vicious,” said John Walsh, a drugs policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.
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Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is Mexico which emerged as the principal route for cocaine entering the US in an effort by traffickers to avoid interdiction efforts in the Caribbean. The result has been the rise of powerful criminal networks there and an explosion of drug-related violence, a pattern that is now being repeated in Ecuador, once relatively untouched by the cocaine trade but now a major hub for Colombian traffickers. Meanwhile, Brazil’s emergence as a transshipment hub has helped drive the growth of organised crime organisations such as the powerful First Command of the Capital Group that controls cocaine exports through South America’s busiest port in Santos and whose operations are increasingly international in focus.
”The people who conducted the seizure in Ireland were doing their utmost but policymakers need to step back and understand what it means for the drug trade. And what it means is an infinitesimally small, if any, impact on availability. Seizures imply the drugs are gone for good but the supply doesn’t shrink. Even more likely it will just generate incentives for drug traffickers to continue to produce more,” added Mr Walsh.
