“I WAS a child kidnapped from India. Then I was sold into Canada and then my final destination was the United States”, says Rani Hong, the head of the Tronie Foundation, an anti human-trafficking group. Ms Hong’s horrific experience was just one of the disturbing stories recounted at a conference in Los Angeles recently which gathered together experts who have studied various forms of illicit networks.
...The meeting was the brainchild of Google Ideas, a small unit inside the internet giant that calls itself a “think/do tank”. ...The irony is that those running illicit networks tend to be early adopters of new technologies. “The reality is that many of these tools are already empowering people for good and for ill,” says Mr Cohen. Drug smugglers, for instance, have been using GPS signals from phones to track the movements of their teams and to steer them away from police. This is a headache for the forces of law and order, but there are upsides to the mobile revolution too. For instance, when a drug kingpin is finally collared, cops may be able to unravel an entire smuggling network simply by accessing the data that are in the kingpin’s mobile phone.
The aim of the meeting in Los Angeles was to spur new thinking about how the mobile internet and other technologies can be used against traffickers and at the same time to showcase a few projects already under way. One of these is a computer model that shows the legal trade in various kinds of arms between different countries. ...Google was able to build a tool that can be used by, say, investigative journalists and others trying to work out if particular shipments of arms seem dodgy or not.
Another initiative, which has been championed by INTERPOL, the world’s largest international police organisation, involves the creation of a Global Register in digital form that will allow police forces and consumers to verify the origin of products using a mobile-phone app that can read a special bar code on their packaging. Ronald Noble, the head of INTERPOL, reckons this will eventually make it tougher for, say, producers of counterfeit pharmaceuticals to get their fakes into legitimate supply chains.
Several Latin American presidents have completely reversed their position about drugs and declared that the technological advances that have boosted globalization have also made it impossible to stop the international drug trade. As president Calderón of Mexico said:
"[E]ither the United States and its society, its government and its congress decide to drastically reduce their consumption of drugs, or if they are not going to reduce it they at least have the moral responsibility to reduce the flow of money towards Mexico, which goes into the hands of criminals. They have to explore even market mechanisms to see if that can allow the flow of money to reduce. If they want to take all the drugs they want, as far as I’m concerned let them take them. I don’t agree with it but it’s their decision, as consumers and as a society. What I do not accept is that they continue passing their money to the hands of killers."
Not so long ago these comments would have been unthinkable. Cast your mind back to 1998, when the UN Drug Control Programme (since absorbed by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC) held a session on the “world drug problem” entitled: “A Drug-Free World: We Can Do It”. Since then it has become painfully clear that, so far at least, We Cannot Do It. Since 1998 global consumption of both cannabis and cocaine has risen by about 50% and opiate consumption has nearly trebled, according to the UNODC’s own figures.
Mr Calderón’s comments sum up what seems to be a growing consensus: stopping or even seriously reducing drug consumption has so far proved impossible, so it is time to focus on ways of making that consumption less harmful. That sort of thinking has been fashionable for a long time on the demand side, with innovations such as needle exchanges and methadone replacement now common in many rich countries. The next step is to explore legal ways of managing the supply side, as Colorado and Washington have recently voted to do.
Sitting presidents such as Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala are pushing for a rethink.
I would argue that it is possible to stop the drug trade, but the cure is worse than the disease. For example, we could impose the death penalty for possession. Iran executed over 500 people for drugs in 2010 and 2011. China does not publish official statistics, but Amnesty International has estimated that they have executed a similar number for drug offenses. But even these countries have rarely been able to stomach killing citizens for illegal drugs and the vast majority of people who are caught with illegal drugs escape executions.
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