Is Burma the next Mexico?
By Federico Varese The opinions expressed are his own.
Hillary Clinton had many “hard issues” to tackle during her recent visit to Myanmar. Yet there was no mention of one of the most, if not the most, difficult issue Burma faces: their lucrative drug trade.
Northern Burma is the home of the “Golden Triangle,” a hub for opium production and the location of hundreds of heroin and amphetamine refineries. So how do political leaders and the international community plan to tackle this problem in the event that Burma truly becomes a democratic country?
The totalitarian regime which has ruled Burma since 1962 has been, to a point, successful in keeping the production of illicit substances under control. In 1999, Burma’s notorious military junta (which is now dissolved) started a ruthless elimination plan of opium in the Golden Triangle (the Shan State, the Wa Region and the Kachin State). The region produced one-third of the world’s opium in 1998, but that figure was down to about 5% nine years later. From 2006 to 2007, the army eradicated 8,895 acres of opium fields. A 2007 United Nations Report trumpeted that “a decade-long process of drug control is clearly paying off.”
The actual story is a little more complicated. The regime did manage to reduce opium production, but this policy led to an increase in the production of amphetamines, methamphetamine in particular. The U.N. estimated that at least 700 million tablets were shipped from Burma to Thailand in 2003 alone, which is about 20 tons of methamphetamine, or 7.5% of what is manufactured globally.
Most recently, opium production in Burma is on the rise again, pushed by an ever-increasing demand for heroin in China, as documented by an eye-opening report compiled by the Transnational Institute, an NGO based in Amsterdam.
In order to see these developments for myself, I spent time this past summer in Muse, a town in the northeast section of Myanmar, and Ruili, right across the border in the Chinese province of Yunnan. “What you’ll see in Ruili you won’t be able to observe in any other part of China,” the taxi driver told me, surprised to find a foreigner around these parts. The place is reminiscent of a Mediterranean country, a relaxed atmosphere reigning supreme, where it’s hard to come by taxis and open shops in the mornings.
In drug war, the beginning of the end?
Between 1971, when Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, and 2008, the latest year for which official figures are available, American law enforcement officials made more than 40 million drug arrests. That number roughly equals the population of California, or of the 33 biggest U.S. cities.
Forty million arrests speak volumes about America’s longest war, which was meant to throttle drug production at home and abroad, cut supplies across the borders, and keep people from using drugs. The marathon effort has boosted the prison industry but failed so obviously to meet its objectives that there is a growing chorus of calls for the legalization of illicit drugs.
In the United States, that brings together odd bedfellows. Libertarians in the tea party movement, for example, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an organization of former police officers, narcotics agents, judges and prosecutors who favor legalizing all drugs, not only marijuana, the world’s most widely-used illicit drug.
In Mexico, President Felipe Calderon has proposed a debate on the legalization of drugs – an implicit admission that the war he launched against his country’s drug cartels in 2006 cannot be won by force alone. (The death toll has just risen above 28,000 and keeps climbing). Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, followed up by declaring that since prohibition strategies had failed, Mexico should consider legalizing “the production, sale and distribution of drugs.”
It’s difficult to see how that could work without parallel moves in the United States, the main market for Mexican drugs, and it’s equally difficult to imagine Congress or state legislatures signing off on the regulated sale of cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine.
But there is growing acceptance that marijuana should be treated differently. Support for less rigid policies spans the political spectrum and has come from unexpected quarters. Sarah Palin, the darling of the American right, recently stepped into the debate on marijuana by describing its use as a “minimal problem” which should not be a priority for law enforcement. That’s a view widely shared. Last year, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by three former Latin American presidents (Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil) published a report that rated the drug war a failure and urged governments to look into “decriminalizing” the possession of marijuana for personal use.
CORRECTION
There can be no doubt that the war against drugs was lost long ago. That point came when the risk to society of making drugs illegal was outweighed by the benefits society would gain by making them legal. Certainly, the risk to society of making drugs illegal in terms of violence, supporting organized crime, costing billions to imprison users and dealers, making criminals out of many ordinary Americans, who did nothing but attempt to enjoy the freedom of using the substance of their choice in situations that presented no risk of harm to others, and the cost of lost productivity from Americans, who cannot find jobs they’re very capable of doing because of a drug conviction is far outweighed by the benefits of legalization, i.e., the tax revenue to be gained by taxing the sales of drugs, the billions saved in freeing up most prison space that could then be used to imprison criminals who commit crimes against the person and/or property of others (these crimes cost Americans a huge sum of money and more with the loss of life, etc.), the production that could be gained from Americans, who lose control of their ability to use drugs reasonably, through rehabilitation and treatment, and regaining the freedom we’ve always claimed to have but hypocritically take away (the legalization of alcohol and tobacco being a good example of this hypocrisy). For me, that should be the end of the discussion based on good, common sense. The conclusion – legalize all drugs.
Obama, American guns and Mexican mayhem
During a visit to Mexico a year ago, President Barack Obama promised he would urge the U.S. Senate to ratify an international treaty designed to curb the flow of weapons to Latin American drug cartels. It remains just that – a promise. Prospects for ratification are virtually zero.
Top officials in the Obama administration have called the cartels, and the extreme violence tearing apart Mexican cities on the U.S. border, threats to U.S. national security. Joining 30 other countries in the Western Hemisphere in an anti-arms smuggling accord would therefore seem a perfectly sane and logical thing to do. But logic often ends where American gun ownership begins.
The treaty in question is called the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials. Known as CIFTA for its Spanish acronym, it was adopted by the Organization of American States in 1997. All but four of its 35 members have ratified it. Bill Clinton signed the convention but did not get the Senate to bless it.
The treaty has run into fierce opposition from groups representing America’s huge army of gun owners, many of whom see CIFTA as a plot against their right, enshrined in the second amendment of the U.S. constitution, to own and bear arms. Reflecting such fears, an essay on the website of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful of the gun lobbies, terms the treaty “a blueprint for dismantling the second amendment” and part of an Obama strategy “to create the foundation for repressive and extreme gun control.”
Faced with such opposition, American lawmakers are no more inclined to tangle with the NRA and other gun lobbies now than they have been in the 12 preceding years. Which really boils down to gun owners and their impact on the ballot box having more weight than national security concerns.
There is no provision in the convention that would allow restrictions on legal gun sales in the United States. It stipulates information-sharing among the signatories that would make it easier to track guns used by criminals back to their last legal sale. That might end a protracted dispute over the origin and the number of weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels whose wars against each other and against the state have killed more than 22,000 people since late 2006.
Nobody knows how many guns are smuggled across the border, how many come from the more than 9,000 licensed arms dealers in the four U.S. states bordering Mexico, or from gun shows and private sales. A widely-used assertion that 90 percent of the guns used by Mexican organized crime come from the U.S. does not stand up to scrutiny but there’s no doubt there’s a steady stream of weapons across the border.
@jfz50: More murders are committed in the name of religion than for any other reason. Religion has absolutely nothing to do with the issue presented by this article. It is true, Mexican drug cartels are employing American citizens to purchase firearms in exchange for compensation. In Texas, for example, you are able to purchase an AR15 at a gun shop. The cartels are then converting the weapons to full automatic. It’s not that difficult (the AR15 is the civilian version of the M-16). It is becoming increasingly clear that actions similar to our involvement with the Colombian government must be taken. I’m a liberal. I think I must make that known before I write what I’m about to write. We need to put the Mexican government on notice: clean up your mess or we will clean it up for you by force. I’m not saying go to war with Mexico, but I am saying we will have to deploy troops to combat the cartels. They are no different than any other terrorist organization at this point. American civilians, local law enforcement and federal agents are being kidnapped and murdered. There can be no negotiation. We must act, and act swiftly, to bring these criminals to justice. The safety of the American people depend on it.
Drugs, terrorism and shadow banking
The trouble with moving big amounts of cash, from a criminal’s point of view, is threefold. It’s bulky, it’s heavy and it smells.
A stash of $1 million in mixed bills weighs around 100 pounds (50 kilos). Specially-trained dogs can sniff out bulk cash in a heartbeat.
All of which helps to explain why drug cartels and financiers of terrorism appear to have been making increasing use of what FBI chief Robert Mueller calls a shadow banking system.
Its features include a legal loophole that allows money launderers to get around the requirement that cash or “monetary instruments” (share certificates, travellers’ cheques, money orders etc.) in excess of $10,000 must be declared on entering or leaving the United States.
It is, however, perfectly legal to carry, say, $50,000 embedded in the magnetic stripes of so-called pre-paid stored-value cards.
They look like a credit or debit card but are not linked to a bank account, can in many cases be loaded anonymously, are not “monetary instruments” under U.S. law, and were labelled “the ideal instrument for large-scale drug trafficking and money-laundering operations” in a 2006 analysis by the National Drug Intelligence Center.
It predicted that drug traffickers, narco-terrorists and other criminals would increasingly rely on stored-value cards — “superior to established methods of money laundering” — because they could be used without fear of documentation, identification, law enforcement suspicion or seizure.
Hello,
I see this type of transaction from time to time back when I work in the hotel indsutry. A person would come in trying to use a prepaid credit card. They wouild give me this hole story about how they travel on business and how theuir boss pass them in these cards. Sound fishy. Once I would say We dont accept them he would come back and ask to pay straight cash. once I say I need an ID they would disaspear.
Government negotiations in drug prices are dangerous
— Peter J. Pitts is president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner. The views expressed are his own. —
On Tuesday, House Democrats released the Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, their comprehensive health reform package. As expected, the proposal to create a brand new government insurance program designed to directly compete with private plans is getting a great deal of attention.
An important power of this “public option” has yet to receive much scrutiny, though. The secretary of Health and Human Services will be given the authority to “negotiate” prescription drug prices for the public option.
This is a big deal. Government “negotiations” with private vendors almost always mean public officials simply dictating below-market prices. If that holds true in the public option, drug companies that want to participate in the program will be forced to deeply discount their meds.
These negotiations might translate into cost-savings for patients up front. But the long term effect would be a stifling of pharmaceutical innovation, leading to fewer new breakthrough medicines and compromised patient care.
How so? Developing a new pharmaceutical drug is incredibly expensive. The whole process –including the initial research stages, the countless in-lab experiments required to turn a promising chemical into a usable drug, and the slow, grinding navigation through the FDA’s notoriously difficult safety approval pathway — costs over a billion dollars and takes over a decade for the average drug.
Forcing pharmaceutical makers to sell at artificially low prices for a substantial slice of their customer base would drastically reduce their revenues, and leave an increasingly small amount for financing the discovery of new drugs.
This country is pretty much the only industrialized nation that DOESN’T negotiate prices.Phrma spends 3 times more on advertising and admin costs then they do research and development. So they already don’t have our best interests in mind. Phrma does business in all of Europe and Canada and is doing fine.The tax payers fund lots of new drugs in our public universities only to have the drug companies buy up those patents and market it back to the people who funded it in the first place.
Just the fact you praise MediGap D only proves you are a shill for the industry. MediGap was nothing but a government subsidy for drug companies that was written by drug companies.
As an American i would gladly pay more taxes and would have no problems authorizing spending more money then Phrma spends on advertising and RnD. Which in turn throws out the argument of not having money to make new drugs. They spend about 75 billion a year on Ads and admin. We are currently funding a war that far outpaces that amount.
The myth of drug “re-importation”
— Peter J. Pitts is president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner. The views expressed are his own. –
On Thursday, as part of the Department of Homeland Security funding bill, the Senate voted to make us less secure by allowing Americans to purchase prescription drugs from Canada over the Internet. The measure is now headed to conference, where House and Senate lawmakers will hammer out a final piece of legislation.
When he introduced the measure to his fellow Senators, Louisiana Republican David Vitter described it as a “re-importation amendment.” And over the next few weeks, as lawmakers deliberate on this, you’re likely to hear that phrase quite a bit. Supporters of foreign drug importation believe that such wording makes this policy more palatable to the American public.
After all, the implication of the term “re-importation” is that once the ban is lifted, U.S. manufacturers will export their drugs to foreign distributors, which will, in turn, sell back those exact same drugs to us.
Brand-name pharmaceuticals found abroad tend to be significantly cheaper than they are in the States, largely because foreign governments impose stringent price controls on most drug sales. Advocates claim that “re-importation” will allow American patients to benefit from this price disparity.
But “re-importation” doesn’t actually describe what will happen if foreign drug importation is legalized. Using the term is an act of linguistic misdirection — or outright chicanery, if you’ve got a cynical streak.
Importing drugs from Canada is exceedingly dangerous for a number of reasons. For starters, many Internet pharmacies based up North are stocked with drugs from the European Union. And while many wouldn’t hesitate to take medicines purchased from countries like France and Great Britain, there’s plenty of risk involved.
This argument takes the debate the wrong direction. The simple truth is that although high drug prices may mean a CEO makes a lot of money, that is but a fraction, far less than 1%, of the what consumers are paying for. So if you say to yourself “It’s OK to “re-import” because it all goes to the CEO anyway”, you are lying to yourself. What is really being bought are the hundreds of thousands of employees working on pharmaceutical development in the U.S. every day.
Our friends that buy their drugs from “Canada” are just freeriding off those that don’t and not paying their share of drug development costs. The result will luckily not mean a lower quality of life because the development has been done already, but future development will lessened. In other fields of medicine, such as hospitals or doctor’s price controls will have a more immediate impact on quality of life.
A revenue and legalization lesson from FDR
– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
(Correcting name of academic to Peter Reuter on Feb 27)
Want to help fund the bank bailout, ease California’s budget crisis and shore up strained U.S. finances? Legalize drugs, tax the trade and save on interdiction, domestic enforcement and the prison and court system.
I’m only partly joking.
It won’t solve all of the U.S.’s problems and lord knows will cause some new ones, but the money is undeniably big enough to make a dent.
After all, it certainly helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who legalized alcohol in 1933 in the midst of the Depression and after more than a decade of prohibition, thus bringing a half a billion in 1933 dollars into public coffers in the form of tax revenue. By 1936, alcohol taxes were 13 percent of Federal revenue.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has a similar opportunity. He is facing a $42 billion budget deficit, his prisons are filled to bursting, in substantial part with people in on drug-related crime, and he will soon be forced by judicial edict to start freeing people. He also has an offer from a group call Let Us Pay Taxes, which claims to represent the marijuana industry and is willing to pay $1 billion annually in taxes if only he will legalize. No doubt they are low-balling.
Don’t even partially joke Mr Saft – just get on and do it – legalise and regulate all drug use – the current set up is a waste of money and lives – the state should not protect individuals from themselves – but as it currently stands the state’s policy is counter productive, hugely expensive and wrecks far more lives than the abuse of drugs alone would do. If one good thing comes out of this economic crisis it will be the downfall of such nanny-state legislation. Freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes.
American guns and the war next door
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
Last year, around 2,500 Mexicans died in the twin wars drug cartels are waging against each other and against the Mexican state, using weapons smuggled in from the United States. In the first 11 months of this year, the death toll was 5,367, according to the Mexican attorney general. Next year?
There is no end in sight. At least two of the lethal ingredients in the toxic brew that fuels Mexico’s ever-widening violence are unlikely to change: lax American gun laws and a Mexican border that barely controls north-south traffic. On many of the crossing points along the 2,000-mile frontier, travelers coming in from the United States, by car or on foot, are routinely waved through without even having to show identity papers.
Weak Mexican border controls rarely feature in official or academic reports on a problem that has prompted some experts and U.S. publications to wonder whether Mexico is a “failing state”. That’s the headline over a cover story on Mexico in the latest edition of the business magazine Forbes. Mexican officials reject the label.
But privately, they concede that Mexican authorities are doing a less-than-thorough job in searching and monitoring north-south traffic. They tend to point in the other direction, to the easy availability of guns in the United States, the armory of Mexico’s criminal mafias.
According to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the agency charged with regulating the firearms industries, there are 9,161 licensed arms dealers in the four states bordering Mexico — California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Buyers from licensed establishments need to go through a background check and the serial numbers of their purchases can be traced.
No background checks and no paperwork is necessary for weapons traded between private citizens on the “secondary” market — gun shows, over the Internet, through classified advertisements. Around 40 percent of all gun sales in the United States, where private citizens own at least 200 million guns, are on the informal market, estimates the Violence Policy Center, a Washington-based group in favor of tougher gun controls.
Sure. Why not? Watching borders definitely better than finger pointing.
Let’s assume Mexico does as adequate a job watching the border as the US would do. . . what would happen? Drug Cartels quit the business for lack of fire power? If there were no high powered sophisticated guns there would be no cartels, right? Mobsters in America during the thirties had it so rough. No glocks, AK-47s or Barrett .50s. It’s a wonder the mafia survived in America.
Perhaps a combination of the analyses behind *The Case for Piracy* *America’s decades old failed drug war* and this column are in order. If we combined all three would we still be talking about the border?
Unlike Thailand, see if you can score drugs on the streets of Burma . . .