Fighting drug cartels needs new strategies

THE drug business appears to be one of those businesses that is growing rapidly, perhaps booming, in Zimbabwe if the police can arrest 143 dealers in Harare and Chitungwiza in just a few days without much trouble, and if a single courier can be caught with 4,3kg of cocaine sewn into his jacket when he lands in Harare.

More worrying than the numbers are the types of drugs. Besides cheap illegally distilled alcohol and the ever present cannabis, we are now seeing cocaine and crystal methamphetamine at the other end of the scale, plus a vicious cough medicine that is legal in some countries, but not licensed, for very good reasons, in Zimbabwe and assorted drugs that are advertised as sexual enhancers.

At the lower end of the scale alcohol, a legal drug if you want to think of it as a drug, has been around in Zimbabwe since settled agricultural societies arose, although for around 2 000 years only fermented products, mainly beer from grain, were made and it is still legal to brew your own and give it to your friends when they drop round, but not to sell it unless you have a licence and pay the taxes.

Distilling came later, needing readily available piping or sheet metal, but illegal distilling has been done for well over a century at least. Since excise duties were imposed it has been illegal unless you have a licence and pay that duty, but there are other good reasons to ban home distilling.

It is very easy, unless you are an expert, to allow methanol and fusel oils, the heavier alcohols, into what you bottle from your still and these are poisonous, with methanol notorious for causing blindness. So some of the stuff available in backyards could well be physically dangerous.

Cannabis, mbanje, has been around for centuries. It is indigenous to central Asia, and perhaps northern India, but was well established in southern Asia and the Middle East more than 2 000 years ago and would have arrived in Zimbabwe a decade or two after some trader planted a few seeds on the east coast of Africa.

Our stock probably came from India on the cross ocean trade routes, since “mbanje” appears to be derived from “bhang” an Indian word. But it has been around for so long it has become naturalised, which makes eradication for all practical purposes impossible. The police can, and do, hunt down bigger growers and bulk dealers, and take action at times against the smaller growers and dealers, although it is very easy to hide a few plants and a small sack of the dried drug.

To an extent, those seeking legalisation of recreational mbanje saying it is no worse than alcohol, have a point, although only a partial point. The dependency or addiction rates are in the same order of magnitude, at less than 10 percent.

But it would present a second set of problem users if legalised and taxed, and there is the additional problem that it is quicker to get “drunk” on mbanje than alcohol and that a higher percentage or users do smoke to get “drunk” than drinkers drink to excess.

While there was a small amount of LSD, a hallucinogen that can and did trigger psychiatric illnesses, was around in the 1960s and 1970s among the better heeled, mbanje was the only illegal drug in common use until well after independence.

Having a non-convertible currency and a tiny black market for foreign currency was a help, since international dealers wanted to get their money out.

Most of the problems in the first three decades of independence with harder drugs were drug rings using Zimbabwe as a transit point for the lucrative South African market. There was some cocaine use from the 1990s onwards, but again this tended to be limited to a few wellheeled users. The switch to the US dollar and the present large pool of foreign currency in private hands opened a lot of doors for drug rings. And obviously they have been walking through these doors.

In more recent years we have seen methamphetamine becoming far more common along with local consumption of cocaine.

Both cocaine and methamphetamine are highly-addictive, both require ever higher doses to get the same effect, both cause irreversible brain changes and damage, and both have increasingly severe physical effects. One effect of the need for higher doses and, because of physical damage the greater difficulty in earning a living, is a growth in crime to fund an addiction.

There are global and regional drugs rings quite ready to supply and grow the Zimbabwean market, since neither drug is produced in Zimbabwe. That makes them easier to control.

We have to boost our efforts. Already we are obviously doing something. The seizure of 4,3kg last week at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport was because CID detectives were waiting for a specific visitor after getting a tip-off.

So there is some high-powered police work already in progress. The raids that followed across a dozen high density suburbs in Harare Province were probably targeting what anyone could find out if they kept their eyes and ears open.

One regrettable deficiency in those raids was the concentration on high-density suburbs. Herald reporters have been offered cocaine in the Avenues and it is a fact that there are methamphetamine and cocaine users in the poshest parts of Borrowdale and perhaps the time has come for the police to develop more contacts among such groups who normally do not mix socially with police officers.

And those aphrodisiacs, or supposed aphrodisiacs, are offered quite openly to total strangers by strange young people in shopping centres.

An education campaign is needed, to tell people of the dangers of crossing from alcohol or mbanje on one hand to the hard drugs on the other. They are not the same although someone buying illegal alcohol or mbanje is quite likely to be moving in a culture were other products are available.

We need to be careful how we charge. The most effective anti-drug campaigns go light on jailing users and instead go for the dealers and the inner rings who supply the dealers. Users can still be arrested, but if they co-operate fully, giving full details of where, when and from who they bought the stuff, and then agree to undergo approved counselling, at their expense, they might be able to avoid court.

Anti-addiction facilities are also required. Suspended sentences, that automatically come into effect for a repeat offence, are another useful way of dealing with first time user offenders.

Even at dealer level, where jail terms are required, serious weight for mitigation could be given if the lower level dealers sing.

Arresting and jailing for many years a person who can wholesale a 4kg consignment of cocaine is obviously more effective than jailing a bunch of street retailers of tiny single doses, although those street dealers need their time inside to think about their future. But they could cut short their stay if they were helpful.

Regrettably the problem is more severe than we imagined. Globalisation in organised crime has arrived. We need to defeat it.