Via the BBC: Africa drug trade fuelling terrorism and crime, says UN
"It is scary that this new example of the links between drugs, crime and terrorism was discovered by chance," Mr Costa told the UN Security Council.
He said 50 to 60 tonnes of cocaine were trafficked every year across West Africa while another 30 to 35 tonnes of Afghan heroin was being trafficked into East Africa every year.
He said the drug streams were crossing in the Sahel – an arid area extending across northern Africa, just south of the Sahara, where militant groups such as the north African branch of al-Qaeda operate
The “chance” in question was a cache of cocaine found in the wreckage of a 727 that crashed in Mali. I find the suggestion that prior to that event that UN didn’t think there was serious drug trafficking in Africa rather remarkable (and surely, overstated).
The proposed solution?
Mr Costa called for African countries to share information more effectively and create a trans-Saharan crime monitoring network.
However,
Alfred McCoy, an expert in the international drug trade, told the BBC’s World Today programme such an approach was unlikely to work.
"One has to be pessimistic about the capacity of enforcement to contain a global commodity," he said.
"The problem is not the traffickers or the traffic, the problem is the whole drug war – we’re brining the blunt baton of repression down on a global commodity and the results have generally been negative."
Indeed.
Regardless of what one thinks is the appropriate approach to combating illicit drugs, the fact of the matter is that the current approach has hardly been a success, and yet we continue to treat escalation of that approach as our only option. In fact, part of the problem here (insanely high profits from drug trafficking which can be used to fund violent actors) is, in part, a result of the drug war itself.
