Addicts VS. Traders

As the United States is still involved in unpleasantness with Canada, it’s worth going back to some of the excuses which were used to launch what looks like an old-fashioned feud.

These days we’re all expected to have a memory that lasts about one minute or two posts on the internet. And internet arguments tend to be painfully linear, leaping forward or backward from one comment onto the next. We rarely pause to ask ourselves — ‘what was the opening gambit?’ or ‘how did somebody get this fight going?’.

I wouldn’t blame you for not remembering that one of the key accusations from the White House about six months ago was that Canada was a major source of fentanyl coming into the United States. Many people have disproved this in the meantime.

Once the drugs are produced/made, what matters is who consumes them and where do they live. The answer is obvious when it comes to drugs coming from Latin America, often via Mexico. Or, much less frequently, via Canada. These are all drugs headed for an expanding market of consumers — citizens of the United States.

Source: National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics (NCDAS)

I posted a Substack in May about drugs coming from Burma and exported (usually via Thailand or China) to other parts of the world. The Burmese were not the consumers. The Thais were not the consumers. The market was elsewhere. A lot of money was made without drug addiction becoming a major local problem.

Exactly the same story is true for Afghanistan and opioids. In 2022, some 80% of the world’s opium and heroin came out of there. It was not consumed in Afghanistan. Again, a lot of money was made.

In both South East Asia and Afghanistan, this production and trade required large private armies and serious corruption of both government officials and politicians. So the trade was in many ways as damaging to those societies as consumption would have been. It could be argued that Mexico is faced with the same challenge.

But nothing beats the damage done by astonishing levels of consumption and addiction.

For 50 years I have researched, followed and written about illegal drugs — including being smuggled across borders. The story is clear. No matter how much money is spent on fighting drug trafficking, the police/armies/governments are lucky if they seize 10, rarely 20% of the drugs smuggled. Yes, they love success story press conferences with piles of their latest seizure.

Tiny successes. Source: ABC News

Lovely feel-good moments which change nothing. I don’t blame them. They work hard.

There are exactly two ways to deal with illegal drugs — at the beginning and at the end. That is to say, when the drugs are produced and when they are consumed. The stages in between, including at the borders, are more or less a waste of time and money. Police forces hate to hear this, although in private they will usually admit that their border successes, well, have more to do with professional pride than policy.

And of course, an epidemic of consumption is not the fault of the police. It is the fault of a society in deep crisis — in this case, the society of the United States.

A classic response of governments, theoretically in charge of countries experiencing a crisis such as this, is to shift the blame away from themselves and their own people. They almost always blame their neighbours.

And that’s how you get to the American president trying to blame Canada and Mexico for a debilitating social crisis in the United States.

Interestingly enough, the right and the left are equally hopeless in this sort of drama.

The left is looking for technical programs which move far too slowly for a problem so fundamental and destructive.

The right — i.e. the people running the United States these days — would love there to be a simplistic moral answer. The last thing they want to do is to address the despair in their own people which must lie at the heart of such addiction.