HOW WE FOUGHT AND LOST THE DRUGS WORLD WAR

Almost a tenth of world trade is in illegal narcotics. It is the nightmare
of our age. We investigate the men, the money, and how we let the enemy win
the battle. By

FOR MORE than 25 years the United States and its Western allies, including
Britain, have waged the first world war on drugs. That war is now lost. The
most powerful nation on earth, which put a man on the moon and defeated
communism, has not been able to beat the drug barons of small third world
countries.

The unpalatable truth is that despite the longest war in American history,
today's world is awash with drugs. The breaking of the £1bn heroin ring
announced with such pride by Scotland Yard last week makes scarcely a dent
- - three-quarters of all drugs still get through.

The major change in the past 25 years is that drug-taking has become an
established practice in Western culture. A staggering 97 per cent of London
clubbers have taken drugs and 57 per cent do so regularly. Ecstasy, an
illegal drug, is a £lbn-a-year industry, and kids spend as much on it as
the whole nation spends on tea and coffee.

But this is peanuts compared with the United States, where 85 million
Americans have tried an illegal drug and where today they spend nearly
$70bn (£42m) a year on drugs-including $38bn on cocaine, about $10bn on
heroin, and $7bn on marijuana.

They have said yes to drugs. In keeping with the first of the two defining
principles of the 20th century, free will and the free market, they have
claimed their right to take whatever they like - arguing that it does not
harm anyone else - and have declined to recognise the moral authority of
the state.

Nor do they seem concerned about health risks - as the US comedian Jerry
Seinfeld says, "Tobacco, alcohol, drugs. The only warning anyone takes any
notice of is the 'dry clean only' label."

To meet this demand for drugs, world production of cocaine has more than
doubled in the past 10 years and of heroin more than tripled. This makes
the production and distribution of drugs an integral part of the global
economic system.

The United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) says that the world drug
trade is now a bigger industry than either iron and steel or motor
vehicles. It estimates the annual turnover in drugs to be at least $400bn,
about 8 per cent of total international trade. The accumulated profit from
drugs (the mark-up on cocaine and heroin is about 20,000 per cent) just
floats around the world banking system. No one knows how much it amounts
to, but estimates put it at $500bn.

This is one reason why the war was lost - the Allies could not buck the
market. As Joseph D McNamara, the former police chief of San Jose, says,
"All the cops, armies, prisons and executions in the world cannot impede a
market with this kind of tax-free profit margin."

THE BORDER between the United States and Mexico is about 2,000 miles long;
it is the only border in the world shared by a highly-developed country and
a Third World one. It is here that the fight goes on to stop heroin and
cocaine entering America.

This has been the front line in the world's drugs war, and if anti-drug
forces were to have any chance of success, this was a battle they had to
win. Yet reports from the front have been remarkably few - for the simple
reason that the US administration has been too embarrassed to admit what
has been happening.

In truth, the border between Mexico and the United States has, to all
intents, disappeared. Drugs pour across it day and night. Cartels that span
Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru have corrupted American customs
officials. Drugs that do not get through by road, do so by air (some are
flown in Latin American military jet fighters) and by sea (on container
ships and in shrimp boats).

Peter Lupsha, who is professor emeritus of political science at the
University of New Mexico and one of the leading Latin-American experts in
the United States, has specialised in what he calls the "narco-democracy"
of Latin America and the links between Latin American politicians and drug
barons.

He says bluntly, "The United States is now facing a military elite in Latin
America that is deeply involved in the narcotics business and has the
resources - men, planes, ships, and communications. They have Americans on
their payroll, sometimes former members of American special forces, who
know how to tap telephones, do code encryptions, and who have the
communications skills to put them on the level of a nation state."

THE MAIN BORDER crossing point into the United States for the huge trucks
bringing goods from the maquilladora factories of Mexico's free trade zone
is Otay Mesa, next door to Tijuana. Compared with Tijuana, where the
day-tourists and the holiday-makers shuttle back and forth with little
formality, the security at Otay Mesa is formidable - with good reason. This
is where much of the cocaine and heroin from Latin America enters the
United States.

It would be a difficult area to police at any time. The North American Free
Trade Agreement (Nafta) removed all duties on cross border trade,
encouraging American, Japanese and Korean companies to set up factories in
Mexico, where labour is cheap, to manufacture goods and components for sale
in the United States. Trucks from these factories enter America in a
never-ending, 24-hour-a-day stream.

If American customs officers were to stop and search every truck for drugs,
the system would grind to a halt and the roar of complaint from the
factories and importers would be heard all the way to Washington DC. So
they rely on random searches, tip-offs from informers and suspicious
behaviour, all the while knowing that, according to the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) some of their colleagues in the customs service are
corrupt.

In an attempt to minimise this corruption, all the interior walls of the
customs offices at Otay Mesa - and along the entire border - have been torn
down so that everyone can see and hear what everyone else is doing and
saying. A customs officer on duty at one lane will suddenly find himself
switched to another, so as to prevent any prior arrangement with the driver
of a truck carrying drugs. Huge x-ray machines housed in a lead-shielded
building like a giant car-wash peer intotrucks which senior US customs
officers pull at random from the waiting lines.

And still the drugs pour in, for the simple reason that the drug barons
have let it be known that they are prepared to pay any US customs officer
$50,000 in cash for each truck he is able to wave through - just a small
slice of the $7bn the drug barons' budget each year for bribery and
corruption.

When President Nixon first declared war on drugs, the Nobel prize-winning
economist Milton Friedman predicted, "Since immense sums are at stake it is
inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government
officials - and some high-paid ones as well - will succumb to the
temptation to pick up easy money." He has been proven right.

The DEA has been warning for some time that customs officers policing the
US-Mexico border had succumbed to temptation and that the authorities had
underestimated the extent to which Mexican drug barons had corrupted
Americans. A senior US customs official in San Diego was quietly retired
and the anti-corruption measures described above were introduced, but to
little noticeable effect.

Mexican and American journalists who write about the drug trade - and there
are not many because of the fear of being shot- say that the drug cartels
responded by buying into the trucking companies that operate the Nafta run
and by setting up elaborate warning systems.

"Spend a couple of hours at Otay Mesa," one US radio journalist told me,
"And you'll notice a lot of guys on either side of the border just hanging
around, chatting a lot of the time on their cell phones. They're spotters
for trucks on drugs runs. They tip off the driver about what time to come,
which lane to use, what to say, and the DEA can't tap into their calls
because they all have encryption or scrambler devices."

But can it really be beyond the enterprise, skill, devotion and undoubted
bravery of the American law enforcement agencies to stop Latin American
gangsters from flooding the streets of the United States with narcotics? To
understand why they have failed we have to look at who the new drug barons
are, and the role they play in the US economy.

Those Americans waging the war on drugs used to comfort themselves that
they had a last line of defence in Latin America - the military. No longer.
A loose alliance of senior military officers in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and
Mexico have become the new tsars of the narcotics business. Their
connections go back to military academies.

Peter Lupsha says, "There are day-to-day military collegial links between
these people, particularly from the military colleges of Peru which both
the Bolivians and the Mexicans consider to be excellent. This new military
elite runs these countries and they all have deep narcotics connections.

"They are the ones who brought in former American military specialists to
help organise the drug trade on military lines. This is why we find air
force planes from these Latin American countries used to fly out drugs. The
Latin American drug barons are no longer just gangsters. They are
formidable opponents with political protection."

But does not this situation - an alliance of drug producers, military
elites and politicians in at least four Latin American countries, one of
which, Mexico, has a border with the United States - offer the "clear and
present danger" to American national security that would justify a powerful
response from the political establishment?

"This analysis in unacceptable in Washington. It is unacceptable to the
drug enforcement community in Washington - not with the field people, not
the DEA agents and the customs in the field," says Professor Lupsha. "But
the hypocrisy in Washington is that it says it is waging a global war on
drugs when it knows that there are more important issues on the American
agenda than the drugs war."

What could possibly be more important?

"Banking and free trade. The banking community, the business community and
Wall Street have deep connections and investments in Mexico and would not
want those investments disturbed by allegations that the political elite in
Mexico is involved in narcotics. You have to face facts. The narcotics
business in Mexico is worth between $27bn and $32bn a year. Mexico cannot
afford to lose that from its gross domestic product. But neither can the
United States or Wall Street investors."

So the drugs war is a sham'?

"Absolutely. If Washington was serious about the drugs war it would hit the
drug barons where it hurts - in their pockets. It would use the Federal
Reserve system and the Chips electronic money transfer system in Washington
to cut off the transfer of illegal monies.

"At the same time you would have to eliminate all off-shore banks, all
off-shore tax havens, as legitimate hide-outs for capital. If you did that
I believe you could minimise this tremendous flow of drugs. But you can't
do that because legitimate business in the United States does not want the
off-shore tax havens closed. Stalemate."

OF COURSE this penetration of the drugs industry into legitimate business
applies in Britain as well. In international financial circles, London is
known as the money laundering capital of the world, and, although City
financial institutions will never admit it, a lot of the money laundered
has its origins in drugs.

THE FIRST war against drugs was fought on two fronts - against the
suppliers and the consumers. We have seen how it has failed in the supply
front, but what happened to all the effort the authorities put into
convincing us to "Say no to drugs?" This has not worked either, and, like
the US, we are now a nation of drug-takers.

A Home Office study, "Tackling Local Drug Markets", estimates that there
are 30 million drug deals each year in London alone. No longer is
drug-taking confined to those on the social fringes. A cursory study of the
people mentioned in drug-related stories in the national press turned up
the following trades and professions: plumbers, photographers,
psychiatrists, doctors, journalists, receptionists, accountants, actors,
dancers, chefs, waiters, investment bankers, TV executives, models, airline
cabin crew, solicitors, barristers, and even police officers.

The Grampian police force random tests its officers to make certain that
they have not been taking drugs. The Law Society helpline says that there
is "an alarming level" of cocaine and heroin addiction among solicitors and
barristers. The British Medical Association says that 13,000 doctors have a
drugs problem. A former Daily Mail journalist has revealed what happened
when the Princess of Wales was scheduled to visit Northcliffe House in
Kensington. A senior executive announced that bomb squad officers would
first check the building using dogs which could sniff out explosives and
"other substances". There was a stampede as journalists raced to empty
their desk drawers. The habit among journalists is not confined to the
Daily Mail.

NO LONGER is it possible to claim that adolescent drug-takers come from
socially-deprived families. The case of the son of the Home Secretary, Jack
Straw put paid to that idea and the president of the Police
Superintendents' Association, Brian Mackenzie, says that when he headed a
drug squad he was surprised at how many young people involved in drugs come
from "excellent families".

When Noel Gallagher, star of the rock band Oasis, said that taking drugs
was "like having a cup of tea", he was pilloried. Yet that is how an
enormous number of young Britons now regard drugs. In Notting Hill, where
heroin, cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy are as readily available as antiques
from little shops or food from the street market, people told Home Office
researchers that they liked getting their drugs there "because they could
do their weekly shopping at the same time or have a cup of coffee while
waiting for the dealer".

It should be clear from the above that when Britain's first drug squad was
launched in Oxford back in 1966 and the then Chief Constable, Clement
Burrows, ordered it to "Crush the heroin problem in two years," he did not
know what he was taking on. In Oxford 30 years on the heroin problem is
still there and getting worse, as it is elsewhere in Britain.

A growing number of the "great and the good" have recognised this. The
Daily Mail, a newspaper which has - despite the tastes of some employees -
traditionally been strongly against drugs, published an editorial on 3
January this year saying, "Manifestly, the battle against drug abuse is
being lost. There were only 33 registered addicts in Britain in 1958. Today
there are more than 25,000; and for countless youngsters, substances like
cannabis, Ecstasy and LSD are simply part of the culture."

The Mail's stablemate, the London Evening Standard, had already decided
last year that drug use had become socially acceptable, that the present
anti-drugs policy was bankrupt, and that its only achievement had been to
drive up the price.

Brian Iddon one of Labour's Bolton MPs, has called for a Royal Commission
to consider drug legalisation. The Liberal Democrats have long advocated a
review of the drugs law. Lord Young of Dartington, an influential
educationalist, says that current anti-drug measures are bound to fail and
that "it is only a question of when defeat will be accepted".

Even the police have their realists. The nature of their work means they
are not the most radical of people, so we should take note when senior
officers such as Commander John Grieve of Scotland Yard say that they
recognise that the anti-drug laws are not working, and call for change.
There are probably many who agree with him, but public debate among
officers has been discouraged.

So PC George Evans, who is serving with Greater Manchester Police, was
probably speaking for many others when he wrote in Police Review, "We fail
to understand that drug use has been part of human culture for centuries.
Relaxing of the laws on drugs would result in large financial savings which
could be used for education and treatment.

"Criminals would be hit as selling illicit drugs would become unprofitable.
Instead we continue down the same well-trodden path which we know does not
work. We continue to delude ourselves that this is the right thing to do.
The truth is that we are frightened and lack the political will."

Some would say that if Britain had been tougher from the start - heavier
penalties, longer sentences, zero tolerance - then drug taking would not
have become an epidemic. But nowhere else in the world has the war against
drug-takers been fought on such relentless terms as in the United States.
And its failure there, too, has been spectacular.