Drug Cartels Use Failed States to Traffic in Chemicals
Most often, the loads are directed to corrupted, failing, and war-savaged nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Ghana, and Guinea Bissau. The governments of countries like these lack even the basic administrative capability to check what’s arriving at airports and seaports, let alone any ability to cooperate in sophisticated international policing operations. Military juntas and their henchmen don’t ask questions — or can be easily satisfied with payoffs. The trail doesn’t stop here.
From Africa, the chemicals are flown or shipped by sea to manufacturing labs in still more weak and corrupt states in South America and Central America, among them Peru, Guatemala, and Honduras. The pipeline finally empties a finished product into the American heartland, where it can be snorted and injected.
This all just started last summer, when the Calderon government discovered that huge quantities of meth-making chemicals were flowing into air and sea ports, 100 tons in excess of the country’s usual needs. In June 2008, the Mexicans put the kibosh on these imports, mostly originating from the world’s few manufacturers in China and India. Mexico was being a good world citizen.
But it was a latecomer to a global effort to halt the movement of obviously too-large amounts of meth-making chemicals. For much of the past decade, dozens of European and Far East countries, signatories to the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, have aggressively policed the pharmaceutical shipments to great effect. Like the proverbial water balloon, every squeeze here sent the chemicals there. When Mexico finally signed on, its drug mafias set out into the world on a mission of discovery. They rather quickly blazed a winding path of least resistance through non-signatory countries — like state sponsors of terror Syria, Sudan, and Iran — that have neither the means nor the will to join the rest of the world.
The Narcotics Control Board only learned about all of this starting in 2007. World governments sent intelligence agents all over the Middle East and Africa in Operation Crystal Flow in 2007 and Operation Ice Block in 2008. The tonnages seized in these operations were enormous, as were those that got through.
I called the DEA recently to learn more about American involvement in these efforts. It turns out the DEA is ramping up its offices in Africa to deal with the problem. It is setting up, for instance, a new station in Accara, Ghana, and beefing up offices in Lagos, Nigeria, Cairo, and South Africa.
Agency officials familiar with the problem, requesting anonymity, told me about huge new seizures that have never been reported anywhere. One nine-ton load of meth-making chemicals bound for Mexico was taken down in Congo. A five-ton load from the Middle East was seized in Kenya.
“They were definitely linked to a destination in Mexico,” a DEA agent told me. “Which means it’s destined for here.”
To date, the International Narcotics Control Board reports laying all of this out have fallen on deaf ears.
As long as that’s the case, and as long as the meth money continually enriches Mexico’s cartels, one has to wonder whether the civil drug war besetting Mexico and America can ever be won.
Simple solution. Troops at the boarder (search and destroy )and begin profiling shipments arriving indirectly from countries that participate with the cartels.
Problem is the US has lost the will.
Close the market and the product sits.
As long as America remains addicted to drugs, these cartels will exact.
It’s capitalism in its most raw form.
I continue to wonder if they had have just not made such a big deal of people smoking a little weed, maybe it would never have come to this. Lies about the dangers of one fairly harmless substance created disbelief that other substances could be “that” bad, as well. Kids are ignorant, not stupid.
Somebody needs to engineer a virus that kills all the crackheads, cokeheads, methheads, and potheads. Then all these third world druglords would be out of a job.
Fact: Smuggling has occurred since the dawn of civilization. Fact: As long as there is demand, someone will supply. Fact: The only way to stop any and all drug smuggling is to legalize any and all drugs.
Fact: Anyone can walk into any town of size in the US, and by asking a few questions of the locals, buy any kind of drug they desire. The war on drugs is a 40 year running joke. LEAGALIZE, TAX, REGULATE.
I can’t believe anyone still writes this sort of Drug War scare story. As long as drugs are illegal, there will be drug smuggling. How long does it take to figure that out?
The drug war offers a rare opportunity to have one’s cake and eat it too. Open government drug clinics that give free drugs to anyone who enters. The only stipulations are that you must show that you have a ride home without driving yourself and you have to consume the drugs on the premises. Offer every drug sold anywhere, at any quantity and no doctor on the premises. OD at your own risk. Leave the existing laws in place making it illegal to possess, sell, etc. The market for drugs on a large-scale basis will be gone within a generation, along with the drug lords who make a living off the addicts, and the legal system that makes a living off the drug lords.
Legalize it, tax it, regulate it.
legalize it
Just joining the chorus – the only “simple solution” is legalization. Plain and simple. Then the cartels’ money dries up and they go to some other illegal and less lucrative activity.
Willis @# 7: You have almost got it, sir. Go all the way by having the Federal Government distribute these mind-altering substances free to registered users.Use the mail to reach the consumers. Take all the profit away from the cartels. Let the addicts alone to enjoy their altered reality without harassment. Go for the minimum cost to the nation.
Anytime the government goes to war on anything, take the other side! Whether it is poverty, drugs or illegal immigration, the government refuses to use its power to tax and regulate to obtain the government’s stated goals. Legalization is the only answer.
Fine, legalize it but you are not eligible for a driver’s license or any license if it can be shown that you are a drug user.
The drug business is not only lucrative for the smugglers in foreign countries, but also highly lucrative for drug suppliers, the pushers, the governmental agencies charged with interdicting the drugs, the lawyers who represent the many folks apprehended, the prosecutors and the ever expanding prison operations throughout the U.S.
There are actually quite a few folks who are against legalization because they believe that it’s a moral issue. Fat chance of legalization. There are just too many folks profiting from the never ending “war” on drugs.
Walt,
Everything you say about the war on drugs was true of alcohol prohibition, too. The status quo is never a reason to quit trying to fix a problem.
“the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the prohibited substance becomes,” says the Iron Law of Prohibition.
First, in this insane war on drugs, we harvested thousands of non-violent american citizens, and filled the prisons past the bursting point with marijuana users.
So marijuana was breathlessly replaced by the newest evil drug, Cocaine. Which was henceforth “sucessfully” largely eradicated and replaced by the malignant crack epidemic. As soon as our prison system population grossly exceeded every other country on earth, including China which has four times the population, we turned our steely gazes to the next National Security Threat, meth. Which is now sufficiently evolved to where the precursors are being supplied by such psychotic and despicable regimes of hate as North Korea and Iran.
Whew! I am sure glas this War is working out good!
Assuming that we can eradicate the meth menace by creating the Amerian version of the Gulag Archipelego with running tank and large weapon battles between the government and the heavily armed drug cartels in our downtown streets, one wonders what kind of psychotic drug will replace meth as the new scourge of american life.
Prediction: the drug that will replace meth will instantly turn users into one-eyed irradiated psycho killers, will cost less than half the cost of meth, will be 20 times stronger, and one hit will last you the rest of your life. The drug will be so berzerkly powerful that the rest of society will be forced to live in heavily-armed and guarded military enclaves for safety, with the entire economy completely devoted to manufacturing, selling and using the drug everywhere outside of the military zones.
By the way, where do they find these morons that write these articles? Is there a police academy where normal people are transformed into psychotic droning drug warrior zombies?