Fintan O’Toole: The demise of the Kinahans will usher in another equally vile crew

A quick Google search this week threw up 5,390 recent news stories about the fall of the Kinahan crime gang – even though everyone knows that the demise of this vile crew will simply clear the way for the rise of another equally vile crew.

The fascination is easy to understand. Rise-and-fall stories provide one of the basic structures of drama. True crime combines the thrills of fact and fiction. And, of course, there is a pleasure in seeing the bad guys get their comeuppance. These are vicious people, inured to murder and indifferent to the devastation they cause to the communities from which they themselves come.

Nonetheless, there is a knowing falseness to the story. It implies some kind of ending, some moment of closure, that no one really believes in anymore.

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily”, Miss Prism explains of her sentimental novel in The Importance of Being Earnest. “That is what Fiction means.”

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The War on Drugs is a prismatic, sentimental novel. The bad end unhappily, as indeed they often do in real life. But the good do not end happily. The supply of illegal drugs does not diminish. Addiction rages unabated. Lives go on being blighted, families go on being destroyed, communities go on being subjected to thuggery, exploitation and the endless draining of hope into the gutter of dependency.

This is news to nobody. I doubt there is a single person in law enforcement, in community activism or on the front lines of addiction who is thinking: “The Kinahans are on the run and our long agony is over.”

[ Dara Quigley’s mother tells Citizens’ Assembly of tragic effects of drug use ]

Hence the aura of strangeness that surrounds the story. It is a satisfying drama of the triumph over evil – but one that demands a willing suspension of disbelief.

Consider the tabloid headlines last week typified by the Irish Sun’s front page: “Major blow for Daniel Kinahan as US cops who captured Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo’ leading hunt for cartel leaders”.

Exciting stuff: being linked with El Chapo places one of our own in the Champions League of drug-related crime, Crumlin United up there with the Sinaloa Slashers. Can a Netflix series be far behind?

But how did capturing El Chapo work out for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that is, according to these reports, now targeting Kinahan?

El Chapo (Joaquín Guzmán Loera) was captured in 2016. The DEA itself estimated that, in 2017, Mexican heroin production increased by 37 per cent. The production of the Colombian cocaine that El Chapo shipped to the US also reached a record high in 2017.

Murders in Mexico, most of them drug-related, rose by 15 per cent in the year after El Chapo’s arrest. His Sinaloa cartel is still top dog in the Mexican drug trade: Guzmán was simply replaced by smarter and more lowkey operators.

[ Mexican city engulfed in violence, including shots fired at plane, following arrest of El Chapo’s son ]

So let’s suppose the DEA is ultimately as successful in hunting down Daniel Kinahan as it was with El Chapo. What’s the result? A fantastic news story. Maybe a sensational trial. Maybe some specific justice for some families who have lost loved ones. Maybe some general sense of satisfaction that evil is not rewarded in the end.

Don’t get me wrong – these are desirable outcomes. The upholding of law, the proof that there is no impunity, the demonstration to the families of victims that their losses are taken seriously by the State – all good and necessary things. Gardaí and their international allies have an absolute duty to go after these criminals.

But, as we pan out at the end of this movie, does the wide shot reveal any reality different to what followed after El Chapo’s arrest? Or, indeed, does anyone at all expect it to?

Everybody has moved way past any such expectation. Everybody knows that even the most spectacular successes by law enforcement agencies against drug cartels are moral fables. They are rituals and metaphors. They enact and represent goodness and decency and lawfulness and safety. They do not create any of those things.

The economic mechanisms are wearily familiar by now. The percentage of illegal drugs seized on the way to markets is reasonably constant – hence the volume of seizures is a measure of failure, not of success.

If more is being intercepted, it’s because more is being shipped and, ultimately, purchased. And the drug trade prices the cost of these losses into those purchases. They are just a business expense.

The Darwinian mechanisms are familiar too. Taking down the “drug lords” is in reality a culling of those of who have become weak and self-indulgent, clearing the way for their leaner and hungrier successors, who will themselves in turn be taken down and replaced.

[ Kinahan cartel collapse: ‘They’re in disarray because they don’t know what’s next and who’s next’ ]

In this larger sense, law enforcement functions as a kind of animal husbandry, keeping the stock of dominant gangsters young and tough and ruthless. There has never, anywhere, been a dearth of eager replacements for jailed or murdered drug bosses.

No amount of money or resources poured into law enforcement changes these mechanisms. The US alone has spent over $1 trillion on the war on drugs since it was launched by Richard Nixon in 1971. Spending increased by over a 1,000 per cent in real terms between 1981 and 2020 – without counting the vastly greater financial and social cost of mass incarceration for drug use.

It made no dent in the number of Americans using illegal drugs or misusing prescription drugs, which now stands at more than one in five of the population aged over 12. Almost one million Americans have died of drug overdoses this century.

Irish figures are little better. In the period of the greatest successes against the Kinahan cartel, their primary product, cocaine, has displaced ecstasy as the second most popular drug among Irish students, and Ireland has continued to have the fourth highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe.

[ Irish people joint-fourth highest consumers of cocaine globally, says UN ]

[ Snowblind: How cocaine became a front in sports’ war on drugs ]

The point, though, is that none of this is even controversial anymore. If the war on drugs is a giant trial conducted across the globe for more than half a century, the empirical results are incontrovertible: drugs have won the war hands down.

Nothing works except reducing demand. But demand reduction is not a “story”. It’s a long and slow and undramatic process of family supports, action against poverty, education, treatment and attitudinal and behavioural change.

It does not produce the rush we journalists get from producing vivid and exciting narratives like the fall of the House of Kinahan and readers get from consuming them. It does not feed the habit of finding pleasure in the knowledge that the bad guys get their comeuppance. It is too dull to shape public policy.

So the Kinahans will fall as the Dunnes did in the 1990s and as gang after gang has fallen over the decades. And when the next bunch get tired or stupid or overly arrogant, we will relish in turn the tales of their demise.

[ Chris Johns: Time to tax narcotics as war on drugs will never be won ]