NEW DRUGS, NEW RESPONSES: LESSONS FROM EUROPE

Europe has often looked to the United States for advice on drug control.
The United States puts more resources into gathering intelligence on global
trends, collects better data on domestic consumption patterns, and believes
its methods of policing drug consumption and trafficking should serve as
models for the rest of the world. But the new drugs and trafficking trends
emerging in Europe might soon make the United States war on cocaine
producers in Latin America seem as antiquated as a battle fought with
muskets. Drug experts in the United States can now look to Europe for clues
about new drugs making their way to American consumers, new producers
aiming at United States markets, and fresh ways of thinking about drug
control.

Europe does not have a drug war like the one the United States is engaged
in because Europeans would find it hard to agree on an enemy, let alone a
response. Europe, for example, is itself a major producer of synthetic
drugs. Synthetics represent a new way to produce and traffic drugs. One of
these, MDMA (3, 4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine, commonly known as
Ecstasy), has the effect of a hallucinogen with an amphetamine-like
stimulant. In 1995 police in Europe seized 396 mil-lion Ecstasy tablets. A
cheap and readily available drug (an evening's supply costs between $10 and
$25), Ecstasy has been an integral part of younger Europeans' nightlife for
more than 10 years.

It is also easy to produce; recipes are available on the Internet.
European traffickers in synthetic drugs do not have to deal with unwieldy
opium, coca, and marijuana crops in remote rural areas, nor with truculent
farmers and producers; they can make the drugs themselves and control the
entire process. Synthetic drug production is as appealing to small criminal
groups as to large organizations.

Small producers can develop their business discreetly without confronting
larger traffickers, which is not the case with cocaine and heroin, where
new businesses frequently have to compete with established traffickers for
control of raw materials and routes.

Laboratories can produce as many as 12 million Ecstasy tablets daily and
are even portable. In 1992 Dutch police seized a fully operational Ecstasy
lab-oratory housed inside a shipping container that had been mounted on a
flatbed truck and hauled throughout the Netherlands to avoid detection.
Synthetic variants that are not yet illegal are also

easy to develop; such is the concern in Europe about these variants that
the European Union (EU) has introduced Union-wide measures to improve
reporting on and accelerate the banning of new synthetic drugs to
circumvent the two years it takes to get a narcotic banned by the UN.

The Netherlands is the world's largest producer of Ecstasy, although police
have also uncovered laboratories in other European countries, including
Poland and the Czech Republic. Until recently it had not been produced in
any quantity in the United States, where supplies still tend to be imported
from Europe. But the new popularity of Ecstasy and amphetamines in Europe
is echoed in the resurgence in the popularity of methamphetamines in the
United States, especially the southwest. The United States Office of
National Drug Control Policy estimates that 4.7 million Americans have used
methamphetamines recently Ecstasy and its variants could easily be produced
in vast quantities in the United States, as they are in Europe; no one has
ever accused American entrepreneurs of being slow to recognize an
attractive new product.

THE EUROPEAN MARKET CONTRASTED Proportionally fewer Europeans than
Americans use drugs. Yet, because both are Western and industrialized, the
United States and European markets for illicit drugs are often assumed to
be about equal, with regional variations in preferences for particular
types of drugs. But Americans appear to be far more likely than Europeans
to try illicit drugs, and this willingness makes them open to new products.
According to a 1993 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 37.2 percent
of Americans have tried illicit drugs. The proportion of Europeans who have
tried illicit drugs, according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs
and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), is only 5 to 16 percent, depending on the
country surveyed.

The United States also has more hard drug users proportionally Americans
use more heroin than Europeans, although traditionally it was believed that
European hard drug users preferred heroin and their American counterparts
cocaine. While it is true that heroin has long been and remains the hard
drug of choice in Europe, prevalence of use is no higher than in the United
States. Indeed, the EMCDDA claims that the European prevalence of heroin
use might be as low as half that of the United States. Nor has cocaine has
become as popular in Europe as it is in the United States: official
estimates put the percentage of Americans who have tried cocaine at 11.3
percent, compared with a European range from 1 percent (Germany France, and
Belgium) to 4 percent (Spain). Cocaine costs more in Europe than in the
United States, and there are other, cheaper local drugs from more reliable
sources that compete with it, including European-produced methamphetamines.

Lacking a serious cocaine demand problem, European governments do not focus
special atten-tion on Latin America when they consider external illicit
drug sources. In contrast, stopping the flow of cocaine is the main United
States international drug control priority United States

drugs have always been imported from other parts of the world, but Latin
America has supplied almost all the cocaine, much of the marijuana, and a
rising proportion of the heroin that United States drug users have
consumed. Foreign drug policy has therefore been intensively focused on a
small number of Andean countries, the Caribbean islands that serves as
transit and money-laundering centers (Jamaica, Aruba, Antigua, Trinidad and
Tobago, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico), and Mexico.

Europe has not had such a sharply defined front on which to wage a war on
drugs. Drugs pour in overland through the Balkans and North Africa; by sea
to isolated coves on the coasts of Italy Spain, Scotland, Ireland, and
Greece, and the major ports of Rotterdam and London; and by air through
every major airport on the continent. Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, the Czech
Republic, Austria, Britain, France, Germany Italy Spain, the Netherlands,
and Belgium are all major transit countries.

The drug traffickers' map of Europe also reflects every major political
change that has taken place over the last decade, from the war in Bosnia to
the cease-fire in Northern Ireland. When war raged in the Balkans,
traffickers opened up Hungary and Czechoslovakia as routes to Western
Europe. After conditions improved and the old Balkan trails were reopened,
the new routes remained in place. Simi-larly the withdrawal of hundreds of
British troops from Belfast in the mid-1990s allowed drugs to enter what
had been one of the few relatively drug-free urban centers in Europe.

THE NEW MENACE FROM THE EAST The most important political change in Europe
- - the collapse of communism - has also been the greatest boost to the
global drug trade in the last decade. Communism's end has given both
trafficking and consumption a stimulus comparable only to that created by
the Vietnam War. Eastern Europe has become the main source of drugs
entering Western Europe, and drugs produced in the east are also finding
their way to North America. The triangular trade involving traffickers in
Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Western European countries like Italy is
no longer a nascent threat but an established reality. Every shipment of
cocaine to Europe locks Latin American traffickers more tightly into this
burgeoning market, which in turn protects them against the vicissitudes of
their battle with United States law enforcement.

The speed with which the drug trade in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
states has developed is astonishing. According to the research group Oxford
Analytica, the Russian narcotics business alone is worth an estimated $6
billion annually and proceeds from drugs are believed to have allowed
organized crime to gain control of at least a quarter of Russia's banks,
more than half the country's capital, and some 80 percent of all shares
sold on the Russian stock exchange. Russia is also now a producer of
synthetic drugs; St. Petersburg is the production center and acts as a
magnet for unemployed chemists and pharmacists from the rest of Russia and
other former Soviet republics, especially Latvia. The former Central Asian
republics of Kyrgyzstan

and Kazakhstan produce both opium poppy and marijuana, and Central Asia
itself is a transit route for heroin being smuggled to Europe from
Afghanistan and Pakistan. A 1997 report from the London-based International
Insti-tute for Strategic Studies said that Kyrgyzstan alone was exporting
more drugs than Burma or Thailand.

Poland has become Europe's largest producer of amphetamines. The country's
law enforcement agencies lack the capacity to control Poland's thriving
band of illicit entrepreneurs. Polish drug producers also manufacture a
domestic opiate called "kompot", derived from poppies grown in the "Polish
Triangle" between Miechow, Proszowice, and Krakow. Poland, like the Czech
Republic and Russia, also produces a variety of other illicit synthetic
drugs, and its central location on the European mainland makes it an
important transit country: Warsaw, Gdynia, and Gdansk are key
transshipment points. In addition, Poland has a burgeoning consumption
problem not entirely unrelated to its dual status as a producer and transit
country: from 1990 to 1996, the number of registered Polish drug addicts
rose by almost 50 percent to more than 20,000.

Policies to respond to this increased drug activity are not in place.

When European law enforcement officials began cooperating with Poland in
the early 1990s, they found a yawning chasm between drug control there and
in Western Europe. In all of 1996, police and customs officials detected
only 97 cases of border trafficking. And not until 1997 did Polish police
set up a narcotics unit to coordinate law enforcement operations. Police
powers were curbed after the end of communism in Poland, but this process
of liberalization, which did so much to enhance civil liberties, prohibited
some of the stan-dard weapons that the police could use against the drug
trade. Until recently undercover and sting operations were not allowed, nor
were "controlled deliveries," police operations in which officers follow a
drug courier on a trail to what they hope will be a trafficker of greater
importance. Countries such as Poland pose a particular problem for Western
Europe because they will soon become part of the EU; the Western European
countries must race to ensure that drug control is at least marginally
effective before their borders are opened even further to new members in
the east.

EUROPEAN RESPONSES The drug war as a moral call to arms has always lacked
resonance in Europe. Expectations about what drug policy can do are lower
than in the United States; the possibility of victory over drugs - the
elimination of drug abuse - is seldom raised, even rhetorically. Nor is
drug policy conflated with military goals and security In the United
States, the drug war has been both a metaphor and a literal description of
policy since the Department of Defense overcame its reluctance in the 1980s
to play an ever greater role in drug control. In Europe, drug control
remains a civilian affair.

There is, nevertheless, a high degree of concern about drugs in Europe.
Most European countries are signatories to the three UN conventions on
drugs.[1] Many European governments have emulated

aspects of the United States drug strategy because they believe it produces
a clearer, more direct approach to the problem; the British appointment of
a United States-style drug czar in 1997 is a case in point. That the
famously liberal Dutch policy on drugs disturbs rather than outrages its
neighbors is largely thanks to the fact that the Netherlands has never
actually legalized drugs but, as a matter of policy opts not to prosecute
most drug users.

Yet even within individual countries there is often little consensus on
drug control. This range of opinion has produced vigorous debate about the
allocation of resources for demand reduction programs, the policing of drug
trafficking, and legalization and decriminalization.

Strong opposition to drugs is always tempered or hampered, depending on
one's point of view, by dissent.

France takes a strong anti-drug stance and for years has been the most
vocal European critic of the more permissive drug laws of neighboring
Netherlands. French President Jacques Chirac has ruled out any drug
liberalization, and has insisted that France retain border checks on its
northeastern frontiers to protect itself from Dutch drug

trafficking and from "drug tourism" (French and German drug users taking
advantage of more liberal Dutch policies by crossing the border to buy
drugs). France's insistence on the dangers of the Dutch drug trade blocked
full implementation of the EU's Schengen "Open Borders" agreement, which,
in the interest of greater European integration, seeks to eliminate
passport controls and customs checks among some EU member states.

Yet members of the French government voice dissent from the status quo even
while their government commits itself to maintaining it. In the campaign
preceding France's June 1997 parliamentary elections, now Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin admitted to smoking marijuana and hinted that he favored
decriminalization. Such an admission at election time suggests that he
calculated that it might win him votes, or at least not lose him support.
Environment Minister Dominique Voynet has said that she favors the
legalization of cannabis, and readily admits to hav-ing smoked it herself.

Those who openly support decriminalization are backed by a vocal minority A
vigorous decriminalization campaign emerged after the 1997 British
parliamentary elections to oppose the new Labour government's hard line on
drug control; several hundred campaigners openly smoked cannabis in front
of police in Hyde Park to protest drug laws. Earnest British students have
made a folk hero of Howard Marks, a recently released British drug
trafficker. Known in the drug trade as "Mr. Nice" (the title of his
autobiography), Oxford-educated Marks was one of the most successful
European drug traffickers of the 1970s and 1980s, responsible for importing
millions of dollars worth of cannabis. Now, with a cottage industry of
books, public appearances, television interviews, and web pages, he has
popularized himself as a peculiarly British type of trafficker: a decent
iconoclast with impeccable manners.

While attitudes toward the principle of illicit drug use vary, attitudes
toward drug users also differ. Many approaches that might be considered
radical elsewhere in the world have been in use for decades. The so-called
British system, whereby doctors can supply drugs to registered addicts, has
been in existence since 1934.

Europeans are generally amenable to the treatment of addiction with the
reg-ulated prescription of otherwise illicit drugs by the medical
profession. In a September 1997 national referendum, 70 percent of Swiss
voters approved a government plan to give regular doses of heroin to
addicts after it was shown that Swiss addicts par-ticipating in an existing
scheme committed 60 percent less crime.

Many of the more innovative approaches to drug abuse have been introduced
at the substate level. City governments have often produced alternative and
experimental approaches to drug control. A transnational movement of
European cities including Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Zurich
produced the Frankfurt Resolution, which supports the principles of "harm
reduction." The resolution amounts to the decrim-inalization of drugs:
under certain regulated conditions, users will not be prosecuted for drug
consumption.

In the Netherlands, where the national approach is more liberal than in
most countries, city governments' alternative policies have often been
toward greater strictness. In the northern Dutch town of Kampen, the mayor
threatened to resign last year if the council passed a motion approving the
opening of a coffee shop within municipal boundaries, and in the town of
Groningen, tougher regulations have reduced the number of coffee shops from
35 to 14 (the Dutch government has a famously liberal policy on drugs that
permits the sale of cannabis in coffee shops). The Frankfurt approach also
has opposition among city governments: the April 1994 Stockholm Resolution,
entitled European Cities against Drugs and signed by the mayors of 21
European capitals, is an anti-drug response to the decriminalization that
the Frankfurt Resolution proposes.

THE DUTCH "SOLUTION" The Dutch policy allowing the sale of cannabis in
coffee shops, which has been in place for more than 20 years, attempts to
separate the markets for hard drugs (heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines) and
soft drugs (cannabis products). The intention is to prevent users from
progressing from soft drug use to hard drug use when exposed to a criminal
underground marketing both. Coffee shops in the Netherlands are allowed to
sell small amounts of cannabis openly without fear of prosecution. Until
recently users could possess up to 0.5 grams of hard drugs or 30 grams of
cannabis and not face arrest, unless the offender was also suspected of
trafficking or another drug-related crime.

In the context of varying responses to illicit drugs throughout Europe,
particularly in cities like Frankfurt and Zurich, the Netherlands does not
regard its drug policy as especially radical. The Dutch government has said
that its drug policy is little more than an attempt to formalize and
regulate a type of decriminalization that is

already de facto in force in Britain, France, Germany and even the United
States, where users possessing small quantities of soft drugs are rarely
prosecuted. Implicit in this view is the sense that the Dutch government
considers its neighbors to be hypocritical in their condemnation of its
approach to drugs.

Other European countries have ruled that possession of soft drugs need not
be an indictable offense. The German federal Constitutional Court in
Karlsruhe ruled in March 1994 that an individ-ual should no longer be
prosecuted if found in posession of cannabis deemed to be for personal use.
The Netherlands argues that Dutch policy takes this approach one step
further by reasoning that if drug use cannot be eliminated, it is prudent
to regulate its use.

In claiming success for the policy, the Dutch point out that the
Netherlands has far fewer hard drug addicts (approximately 180 per 100,000
of the population) than neighboring France (280 per 100,000),

and that in the last 20 years the number of Dutch cannabis users has
remained stable, at around 600,000. They note that most Dutch heroin
addicts are over 30, and that fewer younger people are taking up the habit.
The Netherlands also claims success in certain public health matters: the
government estimates that the number of deaths resulting from overdose, for
example, is less than half that of most European countries.

Yet the Netherlands has, under duress, changed its liberal policy on
illicit drugs. In 1995 a policy review recommended reducing the
availability of soft drugs by limiting the number of retail outlets (some
1,200 coffee shops and an estimated 900 other unregulated points of sale).
Serious drug users were required to undergo compulsory rehabilitation. Most
dramatic of all, the amount of cannabis individuals could buy in coffee
shops was reduced from 30 grams to

5. The pressure for change came not from within the Netherlands but from
its disgruntled neighbors, France and Germany which objected to their own
citizens crossing the Dutch border to buy drugs. The Netherlands had agreed
to ensure that its neighbors were not inconvenienced by its drug policy
which was interpreted to mean surveillance of points of sale, especially in
border regions. Coop-eration with neighbors also meant large-scale police
deployment to apprehend drug runners at borders and ports. In 1994 the
Dutch police arrested more than 800 people at the frontiers for drug
offenses. Greatly increased policing at the borders, however, did not
satisfy French and German concerns, and their dissatisfaction led directly
to the change in Dutch policy BEYOND RHETORIC: EUROPE AND MULTILATERAL
COOPERATION Some European countries are dearly disturbed by their
neighbors' drug policies.

However, the paradox of European drug policy is that, although European
countries differ widely in their policies, they engage in far more
multilateral drug cooperation than any other region in the world. In
comparison with the Europeans, not a single country in the Western
Hemisphere has displayed more than a rhetorical commitment to multilateral
cooperation. The Organization of American States

Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission has at times almost withered
away for lack of attention and funding. When the commission wanted to set
up a hemispheric network of drug information centers in the late 1980s, it
turned to the EU for initial funding because it could not raise sufficient
interest among its own member states. The United States spends little more
than $5 million a year for multilateral cooperation, which is loose change
in a federal drug budget of $16 billion in 1997. Although the United States
has spent millions on drug control in Latin America, the funding is
bilateral.

The nations of Latin America might have supported United Nations
International Drug Control Program (UNDGP) projects in their own countries,
but otherwise have seldom looked beyond their own borders except to
complain, albeit with some justification, about the catalyzing effects of
the voracious American demand for drugs.

For more than a decade, the UNDCP has been mainly a conduit for European
antinarcotics funding. Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and, in
particular, Italy have all financed major UNDCP projects in alternative
development (such as crop replacement, where farmers of coca and opium
poppy crops are given assistance to allow them to produce licit crops
instead), judicial assistance, and treatment, education, and rehabilitation
programs. Without Italian support in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the
UNDCP would not have been able to initiate projects in Latin America or
even sustain them.

European countries have undertaken these tasks without sacrificing the
integrity of their own foreign interests and responsibilities. The EU is
far from being a unitary actor on the world stage, and in their external
relations on drugs the countries of Western Europe do not necessarily have
the same priorities. Britain, France, and the Netherlands have dependent
territories and former colonies in the Caribbean that make drug trafficking
and money laundering there a special responsibility Spain is concerned
about cannabis trafficking from North Africa and complains that Gibraltar,
an adjacent British territory is a transshipment point for drugs. Germany
is less concerned about Gibraltar than about amphetamine trafficking from
Poland and the Netherlands, and marijuana and heroin production in Central
Asia. Multilateral cooperation only enhances their commitment to these
individual priorities.

Inside the EU, countries are also risking the surrender of considerable
sovereignty over law enforcement to facilitate multilateral cooperation on
transnational crime. When EU member states committed themselves in the late
1980s to a Single European Market, they were voting for the free movement
of goods, capital, and people throughout Western Europe. Most countries -
only Britain, Denmark, and Ireland firmly refused - wanted to see open
borders between EU members. Open borders, however, facilitate transnational
crime as well as transnational trade, and a complex network of law
enforcement measures to deal with the consequences of open borders, such as
hot

pursuit, cross-border surveillance, and refugee status, has gradually been
put in place. The Europeans have also set up Europol. Formally proposed in
June 1991, Europol was a German initiative originally envisaged as a
European police force, but its inter-governmental status makes it far from
a European version of the FBI. Instead, it remains an intelligence-sharing
agency with no executive or investigative powers, a focal point for
multilateral cooperation on drugs.

No one believes multilateral cooperation is easy. There are many
difficulties in exchanging intelligence quickly and effectively among 15
(and soon to be more) countries with different languages and legal
institutions. After several years of wrangling the Europol convention has
still not been fully ratified. There is resistance to the agency based on
profound misgivings about the ceding of sovereignty on law enforcement to
the EU, and on the potential threat to civil liberties involved in the
widening of police powers at the supranational level.

The new drugs and traffickers emerging from Europe are reason enough for
the United States to analyze the drug situation in Europe closely.

But the fact that the challenges of multilateral drug cooperation are being
so directly and urgently addressed in Europe just as the Western Hemisphere
countries are considering multilateral cooperation themselves means that
they should also be looking toward Europe for an intimation of how truly
regional drug cooperation might function.

[1]The three are the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic
Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, also known as the Vienna Convention; the
1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances; and the 1961 Single Convention
on Narcotic Drugs.

Checked-by: (Matt Elrod)