Drugs & Crime

Opium farmers in the Australian state of Tasmania are learning the dangers of leaving their product out in the open:

Wallabies eating in Tasmania's legally grown opium poppy fields are getting "high as a kite" and hopping around in circles, trampling the crops, a state official said.

Tasmania's attorney-general, Lara Giddings, told a budget hearing yesterday that she had recently read about the marsupials' antics in a brief on the state's large poppy industry. Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

"We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," the Mercury newspaper quoted Giddings as telling the hearing. "Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Whether the UN wants to treat the problem as an illness or a crime is at this point unknown. 

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The new UN world drug report has some good news - worldwide cocaine and opium production are down: 

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan, where 93% of the world's opium is grown, declined 19% in 2008, according to the UN world drug report. In Colombia, which produces half of the world's cocaine, cultivation of coca fell 18% while production declined 28% compared with 2007. Global coca production, at 845 tonnes, was said to be at a five-year low, despite some increases in cultivation in Peru and Bolivia[...]

The world's most popular drug, though, is still going strong, and getting more dangerous: 

Cannabis remains the most widely cultivated and used drug around the world, although estimates are less precise. Data also show that it is more harmful than commonly believed, said the report.

The average THC content (the harmful psychotropic component) of hydroponic marijuana in North America almost doubled in the past decade. "This has major health implications as evidenced by a significant rise in the number of people seeking treatment," said the report.

The world's biggest markets for cannabis were North America, Oceania, and western Europe. For cocaine, North America and some parts of western Europe remain the main markets, with the UK having the highest number of users and Spain the highest number per capita and the largest number of seizures.

The biggest headlines, though, came from the new approach for dealing with users:

"People who take drugs need medical help, not criminal retribution," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of [the UN Office on Drugs and Crime], calling for universal access to drug treatment. Since people with serious drug problems provided the bulk of drug demand, treating this problem was one of the best ways of shrinking the market.

His call for international law enforcement to target traffickers rather than users came as it was announced that there is a worldwide growth in synthetic drugs.

Drug law reformers saw Costa's words as a significant sign in the debate over the "war on drugs". However, he said that legalisation was not the answer.

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Michael Schwirtz of the New York Times reported Tuesday on some, uh, innovative crime fighting techniques of Russian police in St. Petersburg. To catch a man seeking to kill his boss, police faked the murder in public, all the way down to staged blood and media reports, and arrested the culprit when he delivered money to an undercover officer for the completed hit. 

As Schwirtz highlights, this could be why so few Russians trust the media or the police.

Such elaborate sting operations are not uncommon in Russia, where the police routinely manipulate the news media in criminal investigations, said Yevgeny Vyshenkov, a former police detective here who is now the deputy director of a St. Petersburg Internet news agency, fontanka.ru. In his previous career, Mr. Vyshenkov said, he once had a journalist agree to publish a fake article to coax a suspect to divulge information about accomplices.

Another question: where was all this creative crimefighting after the broad daylight murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya? On Monday, the Russian Union of Journalists released a report condemning Russian authorities for failing to protect journalists.

Remember those movies with such convoluted plot twists that make you say "there's no way that would happen in real life?" Yet, in Australia, the Melbourne gang war continues to prove that fact can be just as improbable.

A vicious gangland struggle that has gripped Melbourne for more than a decade took a surprising twist this week when the matriarch of the city’s most powerful criminal clan was charged in connection with the murder of her brother-in-law.

Behind the image of friendly suburbia the city presents to the world, a battle for control of the lucrative drugs trade has led to the deaths of more than 30 people and brought mayhem to the streets.

The past two years have been quiet — relatively speaking — but that all changed with the killing of Des “Tuppence” Moran, 61, on Monday. He was shot a number of times, at close range, by two masked men as he sipped his daily coffee in a café in the busy Ascot Vale area[...]

About 15 minutes after the shooting, Judy Moran — whose two sons, Jason and Mark, and husband Lewis (Des’s brother) have all been killed in the gangland wars — arrived at the crime scene in tears, screaming his name[...]

However, within 24 hours Mrs Moran, 64, and her friend Suzanne Kane, 45, were charged with being accessories to the murder, with Ms Kane’s partner, Geoffrey Amour, being charged with the killing.

Police told a court that officers saw Mrs Moran dumping the getaway car and a rifle used in the murder, while phone taps caught her discussing the disposal of other items used in the killing. A search of Mrs Moran’s home uncovered three handguns, a loaded shotgun, stolen numberplates, clothing and a wig matching the description of those worn by the gunmen who carried out the hit.

In a further twist, Mrs Moran’s house was damaged severely on Tuesday night in a fire described by police as suspicious.

Thinking this would be a great TV show? Too late to get credit for that: the gang war has already been turned into a critically and commercially successful show in Australia. In fact, it was so popular that the program was banned from being broadcast in one Australian state, for fears of swaying a murder trial. Ironically, many people ended up seeing the series anyways--through illegal copies.

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I knew that drug smugglers were starting to use semi-submersible vessels but carry cocaine into North America, but it seems this is more than a freak occurrence. The Washington Post reports that more than a third of the Colombian cocaine smuggled into the United States now travels by submarine:

The subs are powered by ordinary diesel engines and built of simple fiberglass in clandestine shipyards in the Colombian jungle. U.S. officials expect 70 or more to be launched this year with a potential cargo capacity of 380 tons of cocaine, worth billions of dollars in the United States.  ...

U.S. officials and their Colombian counterparts have detected evidence of more than 115 submersible voyages since 2006. They have apprehended the crews of more than 22 submersibles at sea since 2007. Six crews have been arrested this year. The Colombian navy has intercepted or discovered 33 subs since 1993.

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