The Insurmountable Challenge to Drug Enforcement

Drug enforcement agencies around the world are battling the production, transport, and sales of drugs from the opium poppy, drugs from cannabis, drugs from coca, and synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and designer drugs like ecstasy, MDMA.

The genetic code for making opium, cocaine, and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) resides within the individual plant, and is recreated every time the plants reproduce and make seeds.

It is possible to make these drugs in the lab, but it is too much trouble and far too expensive, when compared with letting the plants make the drug naturally. So geneticists have discovered how to take these genes and place them in bacteria, farm animals, or other plants. This allows for covert drug synthesis across a much wider range of plants, climates, altitudes, etc.

Eventually, production of synthetic drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamine are likely to be automated -- either by coding into genes, or by nano-sizing the synthesis in a tiny assembly line of nano-enzymes.

Just as coca, cannabis, and the poppy are able to take sunlight, water, and soil nutrients, turning them into mind altering alkaloids, so will future bio- or nano- drug factories take cheap feedstocks and energy inputs and convert them into high priced, illegal drugs -- covertly.

A nano- drug factory might fit inside a lady's handbag or a student backpack, for example, operating off batteries. A bio- drug factory might actually be implanted inside the drug user himself, producing the illicit drug only in response to a particular epigenetic command signal, such as coded laser light pulses in specific frequencies.

The problem for future drug enforcement agencies is much bigger than keeping people from getting high, however. Future drugs will make people smarter, faster, stronger, and more creative. These drugs will make people "more" than they are in some ways, and once people experience themselves as "more," they will typically not want to go back.

Combining the greater power of future drugs to facilitate a person's goals, with the increasingly covert nature of producing future drugs, will make drug enforcement exponentially more difficult -- approaching impossible.

Global societies are going through many changes. Modern civilisation (western nations plus East Asia), in particular, is experiencing an existential crisis, with unsustainably low birth rates and widespread loss of direction and purpose -- beyond desiring a life of ease -- among the young.

Such societies are vulnerable to mind-altering experiences, including drugs and cults. If these societies wish to see the dawn of the 21st century, they had best take inventory and make some hard choices.

The twin destructors of massive debt and demographic decline are only the prelude to coming attractions, for those who fail to wake up.

Wasting Resources and Corrupting the System

MJPerry

This visual display of US federal prisoners by category of offense helps to place the US system of law enforcement and imprisonment into perspective.

There are currently 93,876 Americans serving time in federal prisons for drug crimes, which is by far the No. 1 offense that results in a federal jail sentence (see chart). Drug offenders make up almost half of our federal inmate population, and that help explains why the U.S. retains the status as the World's No.1 Jailer with a prison population of 730 per 100,000 population, more than even any of the world's most notorious and oppressive regimes like Burma (120 per 100,000 population), Cuba (510 per 100,000 population), and Iran (333 per 100,000). _MJPerry

US popular demand for illegal drugs drives a huge global industry of drug-related profit making -- from Burma to Afghanistan to Bolivia to Colombia to Mexico and beyond. The gigantic profits in the drug trade lead to the corruption of military, paramilitary, and civilian enforcers in every nation that is touched by the illicit drug industry.

The drug trade likewise generates high rates of violence, as competing groups vie for control of lucrative drug transport and distribution routes and territories.

The only reasonable strategy for achieving a more rational balance of imprisonment, as well as reducing drug related corruption and violent crime, is to slash the profitability of the drug trade.

The answer is not a simple one, given the all too demonstrable human weakness for self-medication, experimentation, social augmentation, escapism, and the chemical manipulation of others.

On the one hand, we are faced with bloated and corrupted governmental agencies which resist any change in current practises. On another hand, we are faced with a strong societal fear of what would happen to the working links of societies, should burden-easing drugs become too readily available.

This fear of societal dissolution in the face of the legalisation of drugs is far more realistic now, than it would have been 150 years ago, when modern anti-drug laws and enforcement were not in effect. The overprotectiveness of an all-pervading nanny state has yielded a cumulative effect on the public character of dependency, helplessness, and a lack of internal grit, substance and sense of solid purpose.

Such persons -- who are today all too common -- have very few defenses against the promise of easy euphoria, megalomania, or sense of calm, peaceful fulfillment from a chemical.

In other words, a sudden and complete legalisation of illegal drugs is likely to create a number of strong and disruptive wave effects crashing through society.

That would not necessarily be completely bad, as long as the productive and protective aspects of society were prepared for the event well ahead of time.

What we are doing now is certainly not sustainable.

Breaking Bad

Clever chemists can create designer drugs far more quickly than a government's drug enforcement agency can identify them, get them classified as illegal drugs, and begin to control their illegal distribution.

“Manufacturers turn these things around so quickly. One week you’ll have a product with compound X, the next week it’s compound Y,” said forensic toxicologist Kevin Shanks of AIT Laboratories, an Indiana-based chemical testing company.

“It’s fascinating how fast it can occur, and it’s fascinating to see the minute changes in chemical structure they’ll come up with. It’s similar, but it’s different,” Shanks continued. _Wired

Some of these drugs are very dangerous to particular persons who may use them, or be around others who are using them. Others may be generally benign -- but government agencies and their evolving penalties for sale and use of these designer drugs, are unlikely to be able to distinguish between the bad and the indifferent. Likely result: A lot more people in prison for questionable offenses.

via Wired

Fattore, whose research specialty is cannabinoids and the new wave of THC mimics, says the new drugs often contain unpredictable mixes of these extra-potent compounds. The same goes for synthetic stimulants and dissociatives.

In a May 14 Journal of Analytical Toxicology study, Shanks’ team described AIT’s tests of legal drugs purchased since the Drug Enforcement Agency’s 2010 bans of three synthetic stimulants and five synthetic cannabinoids.

A full 95 percent of the products contained compounds not covered by the law. They’d been subtly tweaked so as to possess a different, legal molecular form while performing the same psychopharmaceutical role.

“If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs,” wrote Vaughan Bell at MindHacks, a neuroscience blog that’s covered legal highs in depth.

While it’s conceivable that laws could be adjusted to reflect each new ingredient, it would be highly impractical: Between 400 and 450 compounds were synthesized by Huffman alone, and those represent just one of four major groups of cannabinoid mimics.

Stimulant and dissociative derivatives are less numerous, the portfolio of possible derivatives still includes hundreds of forms. A compound-by-compound pursuit could last for decades. _Wired

Why do chemists go to so much trouble to generate such a wide range of designer drugs, when most of them are likely to be crap? Because a lot of people will do almost anything to get high, and governments have made it a criminal offense to get high on relatively safe drugs.

You know where all of this is going to lead? Gene-engineered food plants that produce opium, cocaine, hashish, and any number of other potent drugs -- inside beans, cucumbers, and potatoes.... Try regulating that!

Of course we are likely to move quickly to more refined types if "highs" such as electromagnetic brain stimulators, intense high resolution virtual realities, and other ways to generate thrills, chills, and unimaginable pleasures, which will ride the photons far beyond the control of drug enforcers.

People want to get high. Other people will bend or break the rules to help them, for a price. The profits from the breaking of the rules make their way back to drug enforcers, judges, lawyers, elected officials, respected bankers, etc. In fact, societies that try too hard to regulate every action of their citizens end up being corrupted, perhaps beyond repair. It is such societies as a whole that are breaking bad.

Euphoria in an Idiocracy: Fast Lane to the Finish Line

Crystal Meth effects have been described by users as having endless energy, no need to eat or sleep, super focus, productivity, and a feeling of euphoria...Methamphetamine causes numerous neurotransmitters to be released in the brain, producing a sense of euphoria that may last as long as 12 hours, depending on how the drug was taken...Crystal Meth is taken orally, snorted, injected, or smoked. Immediately after smoking or intravenous injection, the user experiences an intense sensation called "rush" or a "flash". This sensation lasts only a few minutes and is described as being extremely pleasurable. Those who take crystal meth orally or snort it also experience a sense of euphoria. _Effects of Crystal Meth

How the World Ends
Crystal meth is taking over the world, from China to Australia to California to Africa to the Middle East. In Africa, it may be considered a stealth epidemic, since many official statistics have not caught up with the reality. For example, drug seizures at Lagos airport in 2010:

NDLEA’s Lagos Airport Commander Alhaji Hamza Umar said: “In 2010, the command arrested 200 drug suspects, including 172 males and 28 females, with 399.431kg of drugs consisting of 237.5kg of cocaine, 44.907kg of heroin, 42.050kg of cannabis, 74.755kg of methamphetamine/amphetamine and 0.240 grammes of other psychotropic substances. _The Nation

Note that only cocaine seizures out-massed methamphetamine seizures. As recently as 2008, methamphetamine abuse in Africa was rarely acknowledged:

It is reported that there are about 14 - 22 million cannabis abusers, 160, 000 - 340,000 opiate addicts, and 640,000 - 830,000 cocaine users for the population aged between 15 - 64 in the West African region in 2008, while the rate of abuse of drugs by youth is higher than the world average... _AllAfrica

Muslim countries are not immune: Iranian couriers are becoming particularly active in the worldwide distribution of methamphetamine.

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's 2011 Global ATS Assessment report, Iran in five years became a major producer of crystal methamphetamines and a supplier of 'mules' trafficking the drug to Asia....Iran is a country with a high population of people already addicted to opiates and heroin.
'The are skills there in terms of producing drugs, and we see a production base there exceeding local demand,' he said _M&C

In Pursuit of Euphoria
Iran is both a large-scale producer and a consumer of drugs-of-abuse.

Today's Islamic Republic offers premonitions of a narcodystopia. Take a car ride through Tehran at night, and your driver may tell you that the underage girls in chadors who offer esfand -- seeds that are burned to ward off the evil eye -- along the highways are really selling sex to enable addicted fathers. Ride the metro, and you will see battered children pitching trinkets and fortunes to sustain their parents' habits. Visit a poor southern suburb like Shahr-e Rey, and you might see a cigarette vendor in the bazaar with a sideline in used needles. Walk through Khaju Kermani Park on the capital's southeastern outskirts, and you might witness young girls smoking crystal meth in full view of park authorities, while in the background a tall, badly sunburned man with track marks on his arms staggers around in an ill-fitting, woman's blouse. _FP

Euphoria in Iran
China's drug addicts try to stay out of sight whenever possible. But the problem of drug abuse in China is growing, along with the growing sense of alienation and unhappiness as large numbers of Chinese begin to give up their hopes.

Shenzhen Overpass
If you haven't read Robert D. Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, you should do so. Kaplan has enlarged the article into a book length treatment, also worth reading.

Drugs of abuse find many niches, in a wide array of lives and geographical locations. Besides destroying human capital in drug users, the drug trade provides profits for powerful and murderous criminal cartels and gangs from Mexico to South America to Africa to Central Asia.

Powerful mind altering drugs are widely used to subdue kidnapped girls who disappear into the sex trade world-wide. These drugs are also used to induce loyalty and motivation to kill in the kidnapped child-soldiers of Africa and elsewhere. Even if these youngsters eventually escape their human captors and manipulators, it is not certain that they will ever escape their chemical captors. And it is not likely that they will ever reach their potential.

It has been claimed that in the UK, high IQ is associated with higher rates of drug use, and it has been claimed that in the US, children of European descent are more likely to abuse drugs than children of African descent. Certainly drugs tend to flow to where the money is, and there are no populations that are totally immune to the lure of drug induced euphoria and escape. Human capital is being destroyed all over.

What is the antidote? Drug legalisation would solve some of the problems by removing most of the criminality involved, and much of the violence. Large problems would remain after legalisation, of course, just as the US still has a lot of problems from alcohol abuse long after the repeal of prohibition. But we should not expect perfection or utopia from our policy choices, only a form of dynamic and realistic optimisation.

Al Fin sociologists and substance abuse specialists have long felt that society needs to develop and make available drugs which provide mild euphoric effects, along with a cognitive boost, and various healthy side effects that are lacking in all currently known drugs of abuse. In other words, rather than prohibiting the experimentation with drugs, youth would be encouraged to experiment with a wide array of stimulatory and euphoric activities -- some of which would involve mind altering drugs. They would also involve music, dance, games, risk-taking of various types, strenuous exercise, ritualised combat of a non-lethal variety, electromagnetic brain stimulation, virtual reality scenarios, and other non-pharmaceutical activities designed to satisfy the urge to experiment with physical, mental, and spiritual states.

But all such activity should occur in the context of the wider experience of developing personal talents and competencies, and practical skills. The strongest, most lasting, and healthiest high, is the high of achievement and a happy contentment with oneself. Only in such a state can a person fully open up to true sharing and love with other persons.

But before societies at large learn the lessons that Al Fin social professionals are trying to teach, a lot of very bad things are going to happen around the world as a result of the failure to learn these basic lessons in child-raising.

Be ready. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Northward Flow of Human Substrate: Bringing Mexican Drug Massacres to the US and Canada via Weak Border Control a la Obama

The bloody violence and breakdown in social order in modern Mexico is incomprehensible -- unimaginable -- to people living in the developed world.

Nearly 35,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug-related violence since the end of 2006, when President Felipe Calderon ordered a military-led crackdown on the country's drug cartels. _VOANews

Thousands of Mexicans marched against the violence in Mexican cities recently, but President Calderon may have given up. Mexican media certainly seems to be doing its best to ignore the underlying reality driving the organised violence.

The best place to find news about what is going on in Mexico -- and what is likely to come to Canada and the US unless stronger US border security is enforced -- is the Spanish language blog, the Narco Blog.

While much of Mexico's mainstream media, especially television stations and local newspapers, has shied away from covering killings and naming the cartels involved, the narco blog and its anonymous curator, publish graphic details of spiraling violence.

"Individuals journalists are doing the best they can, but in general I don't think the media has done a fair job in covering drug violence," says Lucila Vargas, a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina who studies Mexico's media landscape. "The media in Mexico are commercial enterprises and their first concern is with the bottom line," she told Al Jazeera.

Like most large scale industries in Mexico, the media - particularly television stations - are highly concentrated in a few hands. Mexicans are more likely to own a television set than to have access to running water but two TV stations - Televisa and TV Azteca - control 94 per cent of television entertainment content, according to the Mexican Right to Information Association.

While experts and average people criticise the mainstream press, there is clearly an appetite for the narco blog's coverage. _aljazeera

The strongest, most violent gangs, are led by former Mexican military officers and elite troops. There are indications that elements of the Mexican government and military are cooperating with these "quasi-military" gangs, for their own self-preservation, profit, and continued political power. Such bottom-to-top corruption may be common among the most impoverished nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But Mexico is considered an emerging nation, with a relatively prosperous per capita GDP, by global standards. Its relatively high GDP plus its proximity to wealthy Anglo North America, leads most observers to expect more from Mexico than outright bloody anarchy. And the anarchy is becoming more firmly entrenched with every passing day:

Over 28,000 Mexicans have been killed, with bloody gang wars breaking out throughout the country and unprecedented violence and terror affecting the lives of ordinary citizens. And although some drug kingpins have been taken off the playing field and significant drug shipments and weapon arsenals have been seized, it is difficult to claim any battles truly won. In fact, Mexico’s drug gangs have become more firmly entrenched in the organized crime world, with much of their income coming from other illegal activities, such as extortion, kidnapping, smuggling, counterfeiting and human trafficking.

...President Calderón and other government officials “lack the political will” to attack this aspect of organized crime. Furthermore, “no key individual or group within the country’s political elite is willing to shake up the bee’s nest” and “go all the way to the highest political and economic levels” of Mexican society to put a stop to the illegal money flow.

Permeating the economy
Just how much money from organized crime is circulating in Mexico’s economy? According to Piñeyro, estimates range from $25 billion to $35 billion introduced into the Mexican economy annually. He specified that this money flows into the country’s legal formal sectors, as well as informal sectors (mostly small-scale economic activities not registered with the Treasury Department that make up a significant portion of the Mexican economy) and in criminal activities.

According to Samuel González Ruíz, who once served as Mexico’s chief of Prosecutors against Organized Crime and is now a security analyst and law professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, the situation is out of control, with dirty money in many economic sectors—far beyond those traditionally infiltrated by organized crime, such as construction, real estate and stolen vehicles. _Borderland

Perhaps close to 10% of Mexico's economy comes from violent drug gang activity. But the actual influence of these marauding, quasi-military gangs is far greater than their economic impact. They are making large areas of Mexico unlivable for civilised persons.

Multiple massacres in the same location, the unearthing of mass graves, the use of sledge hammers as weapons of execution, presumably to save the cost of bullets, and the routine use of "payback" murders of civilian workers (including women and children) by rival gangs --- points to a widespread creeping horror permeating life not just in borderland cities, but into the heart of Mexico. Even drug rehab centres in Mexico are evolving into foci of drug gang terror and murder.

US President Obama's response to all of this is to order US Border Patrol agents not to enforce border laws, and to go on a legal offensive against the US state of Arizona -- which is lawfully attempting to enforce on-the-books US laws against illegal immigration.

Some have accused Mexican President Calderon of being in league with the strongest and most militarised drug gangs, and others have accused US President Obama of passively promoting illegal immigration and lax enforcement of US border controls and voting laws, in order to increase votes for his political coalition and party.

It is clear that the current US government is not taking the threat seriously, and is placing its citizens in an increasingly vulnerable posture with regard to the northward creeping lawlessness, corruption, and bloody violence.

What is the answer? The problem has gone far beyond drug trafficking into kidnapping, robbing and massacre of travelers on cross-country buses, and the typical activities of organised crime -- gambling, prostitution, extortion, sophisticated armed robberies, political corruption etc. Any solution must take all of that into account, along with the ever-present threat of allowing the importing of global terrorism along with narco-terrorism along southern US borders.

If Americans have better legal methods of "getting high," they are less likely to seek out the products of illegal gangs and smugglers -- thus cutting off the profits of drug gangs at the hips. If you want to cut the profits off at the neck, you will need to enforce border security as if it were a matter of national security -- which it is.

Canada's future security depends upon the will of the US government to enforce its own security concerns. If the US fails, both Canadians and Americans will ultimately suffer.

A 2010 analysis of drug war coverage from the Fundacion MEPI, and investigate journalism center, found that regional newspapers in Mexico are failing to report most execution style killings linked to cartels. Journalists interviewed for the study said threats, bribes and other forms of pressure influenced their decisions not to cover killings or name the suspected cartels involved.

"Organised crime members have tried to bribe or influence traditional media [and] that is the importance of social media," says Raul Trejo Delabre, an independent media analyst in Mexico City.

"Thirty three million Mexicans use the Internet everyday," he told Al Jazeera, adding that average people use Twitter, Facebook and cellphone text messages to warn their friends about shoot-outs in the neighbourhood. The blog gets at least three million hits per week, the anonymous author told Associated Press in 2010 and the stats are likely higher now.

Regardless of the role of citizen journalism in keeping people informed or the journalistic ethics behind drug war coverage guidelines, Lucila Vargas doesn't think the policy will make much of a dent in the violence engulfing Mexico. "Journalism is only part of the popular culture landscape, which includes film, music and TV programmes and all of these have been glorifying the violence," she told Al Jazeera. _aljazeera

Mexico may be a lost cause. The US and Canada can be saved, if their governments realise that their nations are under attack in an undeclared war which presents a far greater threat than an overt war, due to its ongoing ability to kill and conquer from a place of media cover and political protection.

Drug Legalisation as a Last Resort?

Image SourceIllegal drugs are fueling crime, terrorism, and violent insurrection around the world. High profit from producing, transporting, and selling drugs with artificially inflated prices, is one of the worst de-stabilising forces in the modern world.

.....prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

....Legalisation would...drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits. _Economist_via_BrianWang

How would one go about legalising drugs in a world where the "war on drugs" generates so much income on both sides of the law? Very carefully. A pampered population such as those that exist in Europe, North America, and Oceania, are apt to behave rather unpredictably if suddenly given access to very powerful drugs that can potentially make them feel better, smarter, and more powerful than they have ever felt in their lives. For many, psychological addiction would happen almost instantly, with physical dependency following in due order.

Al Fin has long favoured a graded approach to legalisation, beginning with marijuana and moving to low potency forms of other plant-derived drugs. The amount of cocaine originally in Coca Cola, for example, was far less of a threat to public health and order than cheap beer and many video games freely available. And so on. The issue needs very careful and dispassionate review and revision.

What is happening in Mexico is an illustration of what is happening in many other countries of the world, including Afghanistan. Terrorism, bloody insurrection, crime, etc. are all being financed by high drug prices in Europe, North America, and other more developed parts of the world. The drug war is a failure even if it succeeds -- especially if it succeeds. The higher the prices paid for drugs, the more profits earned by drug cartels and criminal terrorist organisations. In addition, the higher the prices for safer drugs such as marijuana, the more likely children and adolescents are to experiment with dangerous substitutes such as gasoline, toluene, airplane glue, and other rapid brain killers.

Mexico is sinking under the weight of criminality, a large part of which is financed by side effects of "the drug war." It is human nature to seek out risky behaviours and experiences of altered consciousness. An enlightened society would attempt to make such innately motivated experimentation and recreation more survivable, with fewer dangerous spinoffs such as drug cartel violence.