DRUG DROUGHT CAN BE SOURCED TO GOOD POLICING

Successful law enforcement has been a vital part of falling heroin
levels in Australia, writes Sandy Gordon.

No thinking person in law enforcement would claim that Australia's
heroin drought has been wholly achieved by police activity. However,
much of the commentary on this subject has tended to downplay the
force's important role. Such commentary tends to attribute the
shortfall to scarcity in the two major source countries of
Afghanistan and Burma.

If scarcity at source were the cause of the falling levels of the
drug in Australia, one would expect to see shortages elsewhere. But
Australia's drought is a unique phenomenon. Europe receives about 90
per cent of its heroin from Afghanistan. However, at the height of
the drought in Australia, heroin was never cheaper and purer than it
was in Europe.

This is consistent with the view that the market was being kept cheap
by the existence of a large pipeline of heroin, morphine and opium
created by the record 1999 production in Afghanistan.

Nor has limited production in Burma and the surrounding countries of
the so-called Golden Triangle - which together supply more than 80
per cent of the Australian market - caused a heroin shortage in Asia.
Heroin in the Yunnan province of China, the main point of consumption
in that country, sells at between $2500 and $5000 a kilo. In northern
Thailand it sells for about $12,000, and in Bangkok $22,000.

In Australia, however, the wholesale price is anything from $120,000
to $200,000 a kilo - probably given the drought, it is at the upper
end of that range. Retail prices at some stages of the drought
trebled and purity fell from about 60 per cent to as low as 15 per
cent. Other things (such as the difficulty and danger of importing to
the respective markets) being equal, it is obvious which market the
traffickers would prefer.

So why has the Australian market behaved differently from other
markets? In the assessment of the Australian Federal Police, there
were relatively few Asia-based syndicates with the capital, networks
and sophistication needed to import hundreds of kilos of heroin into
Australia.

Progressively after 1998, Australian law enforcement began to operate
more effectively with colleagues from the Asian region. Together this
network of law enforcement agencies was able to build a better
understanding of how the syndicates operated. A number of the major
players in the region were consequently put out of action. And
because there were relatively few players, there was the potential
eventually to affect the market.

But why was the effect so sudden, resulting in the drying up of
heroin on the Australian market in the period between November and
December 2000?

It is possible that the dismantling of a major syndicate in mid-2000
by an Australian-led international task force may have been the
"straw that broke the camel's back" of the heroin market here. This
syndicate allegedly had been bringing in large shipments on a regular
basis, using an excellent modus operandi (from its point of view).

Since the start of the heroin drought, seizure data has tended to
support the view that the large syndicates shipping to Australia were
either disrupted or warned off.

Detections of large amounts at the border have fallen sharply, both
in terms of volume of heroin trafficked and number of seizures. On
the other hand, detections of small amounts brought in by courier
have increased in number.

This is consistent with a pattern in which individual players working
on their own account have sought to exploit an expensive market, but
one in which big, sophisticated players have either chosen not to
play due to risks discussed above, or else not been there to play
because they have been taken out of action.

The drought is, in part, due to the fact that smaller players are not
capable of fulfilling total demand. As pointed out by a recent paper
in Crime and Justice by Don Weatherburn, et al, the good news from
the heroin drought is that some of the harms associated with heroin
use, including overdose deaths, have been reduced. Presumably also, a
new cadre of users that would otherwise have come onto the market has
not done so.

However, there is no guarantee that heroin will not again flow more
freely into the Australian market. When the Cali cartels in Colombia
were dismantled in the early 1990s, numerous mid- and low-level
traffickers took over the cocaine trade. As they developed their
trafficking skills, they proved just as difficult to dislodge as the
Cali cartels - and there were more of them.

We need to guard against the possibility that the situation in
Australia may evolve along similar lines.