Anti-drug drive has backfired, says UN

A UN anti-drug drive has backfired by making drug cartels so wealthy they can bribe their way through tracts of west Africa and central America, the UN crime agency chief has said.

The 10-year campaign had cut drug production and the number of users, said Antonio Maria Costa, but drug gangs were using their enormous profits to undermine security and development in nations already plagued by poverty, joblessness and HIV-AIDS.

Drug mobs were “buying officials, elections and parties, in a word — power,” said Costa, director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

“While ghettos burn, west Africa is under attack (by drug traffickers), drug cartels threaten central America and drug money penetrates bankrupt financial institutions,” he said.

Costa spoke at the launch of a meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to review the decade since a UN General Assembly special session set targets to tackle producers, traffickers and end users.

Papering over internal dissent over how to make anti-drug policy more effective, the 53 nations on the commission are expected to today sign a declaration committing themselves to the programme to fight the drug trade for another 10 years.

“If we look at the physical dimensions of the problem — tonnes of [narcotics] production and numbers of addicts — we can state that humanity has made measurable progress [since 1998],” said Costa.

Global addiction had stabilised. “This is no longer the runaway train of the 1980s and 1990s,” he said.

But he conceded world markets were still supplied with about 1,000 tonnes of heroin, around 1,000 tonnes of cocaine and untold volumes of cannabis (marijuana) and synthetic drugs.

“So there is still much more to be done,” he said.