Comrades in arms: South Africa, Russia, and the new global war on drugs

By Kevin Bloom

As the West throttles down on its 45-year-old war on drugs, acknowledging that the trillion-dollar price tag has only fuelled civil conflict in Latin America, crowded the prisons at home, and harmed more addicts than it has healed, another bloc of nations is gearing up to implement the self-same failed policies. So guess who’s with China, Indonesia, Russia and the Middle East on this? Yup, South Africa, under the inspired guidance of the Hawks.

The Hawks and the Kremlin Drug Czars

“Home page of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation”. That’s what it says above the URL address bar where the announcement that forms the backbone — or, more accurately, the central bone of contention — of this article appears. As per the announcement, there is a new acronym in the global war on drugs, which at first glance seems as bland and inoffensive as any other acronym that occasionally gets beamed down to us from the Starship Geopolitics: RAADD, short for Russia-Africa Anti-Drugs Dialogue. But before we tell you exactly who the Hawks (aka the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation) have chosen to “dialogue” with in the Russians, and before we explain why calling this an “Africa”-wide partnership is wishful thinking at best, let us lay out the principles upon which RAADD has been set up.

“The contemporary global drug phenomenon is unprecedented in its scale and implications,” we read in the announcement, “as it threatens security, stability, undermines sustainable economic development and adversely affects the health and well-being of human beings. The global illicit drug trade has assumed macroeconomic proportions and is rapidly diversifying to new markets (the so-called balloon effect). Africa’s drug landscape is constantly evolving. In the past Africa predominantly produced and abused cannabis, but more recently there is greater availability of harder drugs such as cocaine, heroin and synthetic drugs. Africa is in the spotlight as it has emerged as a corridor for large-scale transshipment of Latin American cocaine and Afghani heroin to the drug markets. South Africa is also directly and indirectly affected by these mega-drug flows.”

Nope, if we’re to believe our own beloved Hawks, the 45-year-old global “war on drugs” has not been the catastrophic failure that The Economist, the New York Times and top officials in President Barack Obama’s White House have told us it’s been. According to the tenor of RAADD’s proclamation, we should ignore the statistics out of the Drug Policy Alliance that puts the number of people killed in Mexico’s drug war since 2006 at upwards of 100,000, the number of US fatalities from drug overdoses in 2014 at upwards of 47,000, and the number of US tax dollars spent in the last four decades to fight the war on drugs at upwards of $1-trillion.

What’s happening here, all too clearly, is another species-wide parting of the ways, a fracture in the notion of what constitutes success in the battle against our common penchant for self-destruction, and it’s just as The Economist noted in May 2015: “[As] one drug war begins to wind down, another is cranking up across Asia, Russia and the Middle East.”

In making this simple yet momentous statement, the magazine was referring to the evidence that was there for all to see. China’s president calling for “forceful measures to wipe drugs out”; Indonesia’s state leader deeming drugs a “national emergency” and giving the green light for a string of firing-squad executions of traffickers; Russia lobbying for a) Afghanistan’s opium-poppy fields to be sprayed out of existence, and b) its neighbours to institute the same ban on methadone, the heroin substitute for recovering addicts, that it had proudly promulgated a few years before.

Click here to read the full article.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Thumbnail: Pixabay