For more then a century, the world’s major global powers have been trying to kill off the drug trade. It hasn’t gone well. But it’s been an interesting trip full of ingenuity, hypocrisy, high stakes and dashed hopes.
Queen Victoria was a drug pusher on a colossal scale.
In 1839 a Chinese official in Canton, Lin Zexu, wrote to Queen Victoria imploring her to stop the state-backed East India Company flooding China with Indian opium against its will. Worth the equivalent of $20bn a year, the illegal trade was a vital money earner for Victorian Britain, who defended it’s right to push opium into China with a series of devastating naval attacks, later known as the Opium Wars.
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15 years ago the UN promised to rid the world of all drugs within 10 years.
‘A Drug-Free World – We Can Do It’ was the happy-clappy slogan of a 1998 UN Declaration, backed by the British government, on global drugs control. It pledged to rid the worlds of drugs by 2008. Brave, but seriously deluded. By 2010 the UN had changed it’s tune, not only acknowledging defeat in its 1998 aim, but warning of the proliferation of a new generation of online highs.
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Drug money kept the global economy afloat during the financial crisis.
When UN drug chief Antonio Maria Costa declared that $352bn of laundered drug cash was the only liquid capital available to some banks on the brink of collapse in 2008, the banking world feigned outrage. However, by 2012, one of America’s largest banks, Wachovia and one of the Britain’s largest, HSBC (founded amidst the opium trade) were forced to pay out record fines for failing to turn away money being laundered by Mexican drug cartels.
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A massive seizure of tree bark oil in Cambodia gave birth to the modern legal high market.
In a remote part of Cambodia in 2008 UN investigators discovered a huge haul of 33 tonnes of safrole oil, ready to be shipped by drug gangs to Holland. The oil, distilled from hundreds of uprooted rainforest trees, would have made 245 million doses of ecstasy. Instead it was destroyed. The ensuing ecstasy drought in Europe created a gap in the market for the meteoric rise in popularity of mephedrone, a drug which not only mimicked ecstasy, but burst opened the floodgates to the online market in legal highs.
Getty / Paula Bronstein
