Cocaine is a dirty drug that causes a horrific amount of misery (and although Western users are complicit in continuing the trade, it’s the prohibitionists who are most to blame for refusing to imagine a more ethical alternative). Read journalist Toby Muse’s new book, Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels — from the Jungles to the Streets, for brilliant and rare insights into the trade.
Nations have choices to make when deciding drug policies during a pandemic. Do they maintain the default “war on drugs” rhetoric and implementation or try something more humane and sensible? Argentina is using seized assets from drug traffickers and sending those resources to federal police. Such an idea is open to abuse — corrupt police and officials can use the assets for political influence — but in theory the initiative is a good one if the resources are redirected cleverly and morally.
In the UK, drug dealers are finding innovative ways to deliver drugs, including dressing up as nurses, delivery drivers and joggers to get heroin to those who want it. Dealers are born to be ingenious. One drug worker from Sussex told Vice: “A mini-cab driver told me he would normally be ferrying kids around on school runs, but now he’s staying busy by driving all the dealers around town.” In Berlin, dealers are still selling their goods as normal while wearing face masks and gloves.
One UK dealer told Vice that although prices for many products have increased, “markets have to innovate and diversify in response to change. So, I’m importing and selling concentrates and vape pens, called Shatterpens. They contain pure cannabis oil, extracted with C02, no solvents.” He said that domestically-grown hash and cannabis were far more in demand while the lockdown continued. Police are still targeting drug importers and yet the smell of futility hangs over these efforts.
Covid-19 is forcing enterprising drug cartels to adapt to radically shifting circumstances (though traffickers are likely to re-emerge with vigour once trade routes re-open and dealers and users spend more time outside their homes). Take the ingredients for fentanyl, for example, up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and a key cause of US deaths during the opioid crisis. Although Mexican cartels produced fentanyl for the US market, they used to rely on precursor ingredients including from one state-backed factory in Wuhan (the Chinese city where Covid-19 reportedly originated).
This factory has now shut down and traffickers are increasingly forced to raise the prices of whatever stocks they still have. It’s unsustainable in the long run, and fentanyl users in the US will inevitably find alternative ways to source the drug, but Mexican cartels are no less affected by the coronavirus than other profitable businesses. Some Mexican entrepreneurs are shunning cartels entirely and growing blood-free cannabis (an initiative that pre-dates the pandemic but will hopefully increase after it passes).
Covid-19 is likely to be a massive, temporary inconvenience for the global drug trade and little more. Why? Because Western demand for illicit substances has never been higher and will continue to be so (and yes, some people are still attending drug-fuelled parties during the pandemic).
One of the main takeaways from my years investigating the drug trade has been the staggering hypocrisy of those pushing a brutal “war on drugs”. There are no statistics that support its success: arrest one drug kingpin and 20 more will emerge in his place, and yet year after year governments and many in the media push for no softening of prohibition.
Although the full legalisation and regulation of all drugs is now on the agenda in the nations most directly affected by the violent status quo, there are dangers of legalising drugs without considering all the ramifications (look at California and its failure to support the African-American community after cannabis legalisation). Covid-19 has highlighted the existing racial, social and political fault-lines around drugs, and those who use and produce them; but too often the most marginalised in the West and around the world are forgotten in the rush to judgment.
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