Special Report - Part One Of Five: Losing The War On Drugs

THE BATTLE TO STEM THE DRUGS TIDE

The Ingenious Tactics Of Drug Dealers Means That, Despite Their Best
Efforts, Customs Officials Intercept Only 10% Of All Drugs Smuggled Into The UK

The 20-foot container of almonds made its way from Afghanistan to Iran
where it made a short, but essential, stop-over. After a few days it was
hitched onto the back of a truck before making its way by sea to
Southampton, heading for Scotland.

Customs investigators suspected something was up when undercover
intelligence officers looked through the shipping line's cargo details: why
would anyone spend UKP43 transporting a container of almonds all this way
when the most it would sell for in the shops was around UKP30?

The container was searched at the Southampton dockside -- nothing
suspicious was found. Back at her HQ, one female officer still couldn't
make sense of it. She decided to go back for one last look round, tipped
out a bag of almonds, picked up a handful of the nuts and rolled them in
her hand. Then she noticed that her fingers were stained yellow.

She had stumbled on thousands of tiny bags of heroin -- each one no more
than an inch in surface area -- which had been taken to an underground
factory in Iran to be disguised as almonds, even down to the pitting and
pock-marks on their surface.

Customs discovered they had hauled in around 60kg of heroin. At a cost of
UKP75k a kilo, they were looking at drugs with a street value of UKP4.5
million.

Dave Clark and Mike Marsden -- who head customs' detection branch and
investigations unit in Scotland -- are proud of busts like that, but they
know that in their front line in the war against drugs they face an
overwhelming battle against ever-more ingenious tactics. They estimate that
customs seize around 10% of all the drugs that arrive in the UK. In recent
years, around UKP1.5 billion of class-A drugs have been seized -- that
means at least another UKP100bn worth have made their way into our cities.

Drugs are a global business worth around UKP300bn a year, just a step down
from banking -- you might as well, as one customs officer says, try to
eradicate the insurance industry. Taken on that scale, it's easy to
understand why Tony Blair has made drugs a number one national priority and
told MI5 and MI6 to prioritise the fight against drugs .

Privately, some of the country's most senior customs officers will tell you
that they're 'swamped'. 'We haven't enough men and we haven't enough
money,' one said. 'I have the most dedicated bunch of people in the world
working for me, but it's 'finger in the dike' time. Drugs are pouring into
this country and we are only stopping a fraction of them getting in.'

Most heroin makes it into the UK through the well-worn routes from
Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the producing countries -- through the Balkans
and then overland to ports in western Europe. By the time a lorry carrying
heroin rolls off the ferry at Dover, it may have changed drivers a dozen
times, have up to 50 different cargos on board from a variety of nations
and a driver who has no idea he has drugs in the back.

The sheer volume of traffic makes it impossible to rely on random searches
to pull down significant quantities of drugs seizures. A few 'drug mules'
will fly from Pakistan via another international airport to UK regional
airports and there will also be a handful of 'boat drops' of heroin at
isolated parts of the UK coastline. Once in the UK, heroin is simply driven
up the M6 from London to Glasgow and divvied up between drug gangs and
their dealers.

Nearly every cannabis joint smoked in the UK can be traced back to Nigerian
drug gangs. They operate by flying their 'mules' out of Johannesburg to a
third European airport -- perhaps Schipol or Charles de Gaulle -- to throw
British customs off their trail. From Amsterdam or Paris, the 'mules' then
fly into a British regional airport, avoiding Heathrow and Gatwick.

'The facts speak for themselves,' says Dave Clark. 'Drugs is a global
business. We have to be global too. We have to measure our success by
taking out drugs and drug smugglers before they get to the UK. There is no
point in measuring our success by seizures in Britain - by that time it's
too late.'

On one flight alone into this country from Jamaica, random urine testing
found that on a flight of 250 people, 25 'drug mules' in the pay of South
American drug cartels had either 'swallowed or stuffed' bags of cocaine
into their bodies. Those figures explain why there is some radical thinking
going on over at Vigilante House in Paisley, the anonymous red and yellow
brick office block that houses Scotland customs chiefs.

Marsden knows that it flies in the face of liberal thinking, but he is in
favour of everyone who comes into the UK being forced to apply for a visa.

'If I have convictions for drug offences and I live, say, in Jamaica and I
apply for a visa to the UK, I'm either going to be told no or I'm going to
be flagged up, monitored and searched when I arrive in the UK,' he says .

Clark disagrees. 'I see the visa proposal as a dangerous line to go down
politically,' he says, realising the policy could come across as distinctly
racist. 'The solution is to support the nations where the drugs come from
in fighting crime . Imagine the political storm if a Jamaican who has a
British passport had to apply for a visa?'

But we are already -- to a degree -- fighting the drugs war overseas. Last
year, 200 tonnes of cocaine from South America arrived on European shores.
A Royal Navy unit is teaching Antiguan and Barbadian coastguards how to
fight the organised crime gangs running cocaine out of the Caribbean into
the UK. We've also got an RAF Nimrod based in Puerto Rico and a customs
frigate in the area monitoring suspicious shipping movements. There's an
SBS unit there using divers to stick monitoring devices to ships planning
to make illegal drug drops on the UK coasts.

And customs now have intelligence officers attached to dozens of British
embassies across the world.

But even taking all these initiatives into consideration, we have so far
spent only UKP1.5m on helping foreign law enforcement agencies, not much
when you consider that a gram of cocaine costs UKP50 on the streets. 'It's
a false economy,' says one senior customs officer. 'If we spent tens of
millions on helping these countries, we'd stop hundreds of millions of
pounds of drugs getting into the UK.'

Customs officers believe their job is made more difficult by both the
patchwork quilt attitude taken by courts to drug sentences and by the
government's "mixed messages" on drugs policing.

'In England, we don't get out of bed for stuff that is taken seriously in
Scotland,' one senior investigator said. 'Cannabis is seen as far less
serious down south than it is up here and that's reflected in sentencing.
If you are caught with 20 kilos of hash at Glasgow airport you are probably
going down for five years. The same offence at Heathrow would get you 18
months.'

Customs is the one UK law enforcement agency least inclined to listen to
talk of decriminalisation. 'We're experimenting with just cautioning people
smoking cannabis in Brixton, while the nation is being told that we are in
a 'war on drugs'. If we are in a war then we want zero tolerance.That means
if you use drugs you're f*ed and chucked in prison. To do otherwise
confuses the public and makes our job difficult. One year all drugs are
bad, the next hash is okay and cabinet ministers are admitting they smoke
it. The goalposts are changing all the time.'