Counternarcotics issues

Raising the Drug Problem Status

to that of a Leading Threat to Global Peace and Security

Thank you, Mr./ Ms. Chairperson!

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

On the eve of the forthcoming Special Session of the UN General Assembly on the global drug problem, I would like to draw you attention to proposals on new measures and approaches of the antidrug policy, which will allow to drastically improve the existing global drug situation.

First and foremost, I suggest clearly defining the position in relation to numerous appeals to legalize certain types of drugs: any relaxation of the international drug control system will result in tragic and disastrous consequences.

The most vivid example is China in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century.

Lack of prohibition on opium production, trafficking and consumption resulted in an outburst of drug addiction in China. While in the late eighteenth century the Chinese population did not know that drug and did not use it, by the end of the nineteenth century the number of drug addicts had amounted to 25 million – it was five percent of the Chinese population at the time, and opium production in Bengali had reached 40 tons – it is five times more than the total amount of opium produced in the world today.

Only the establishment of the international drug control system initiated after the Shanghai Opium Commission in 1909 allowed to halt and reverse the process.

Today lifting the ban on selling this or that drug will inevitably lead to the same results: an outburst in the use and production of that drug.

Meanwhile the antidrug policy, formulated for the past 100 years and envisaged in the three basic UN conventions, requires substantial supplementation and reinforcement.

The main drawback of the international community's drug strategy is the perception of the drug problem as primarily a problem of crime and of individuals' health –that is to say, in fact, only its impact on the medical and social aspect of the problem is noted, while the main aspect – the devastating impact of drugs on the national, regional and global security – is left aside.

All this actually entails a fiasco of standard drug measures and approaches, since, in fact, uncoordinated activities of the international community are opposed to global transnational crime, which can within the shortest possible time pass from accumulating financial resources and drug trafficking to setting political goals and transforming into an entity of alternative political and geopolitical governance.

I would like to draw your special attention to the description of the process itself.

Close relationships between terrorist organizations and the drug business have already been evident for everyone for a long time. However, there is a widespread erroneous perception that drugs are just an instrument of funding terrorist organizations. But in fact the situation is quite the opposite: terrorist organizations are an instrument for drug business captains, actually hired labor, a kind of a special task force of the drug mafia.

Captains of the drug business purposefully allocate insignificant proportions of their revenue, within 5 – 10 %, to establish controlled terrorist organizations in order to put pressure on legitimate national governments and to physically destroy drug trafficking competitors.

It is particularly obvious if we look at the example of Latin American countries in the Western Hemisphere, where the level of criminal violence – about 100 thousand murders a year – has long turned into terrorism, just without the customary, media-imposed attributes of the Eastern Hemisphere's "Islamism".  For instance, the number of murders committed in Salvador in June 2015 within 72 hours was twice as high as in the United Kingdom during a whole year. As if there's no terrorism!

Meanwhile there is obvious mass media bias, related to the coverage of rare, individual cases of pseudo ideological violence in the Eastern Hemisphere and ignoring thousand-fold, large-scale violence caused by drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere.

Long-term and large-scale drug production generates transnational and transcontinental drug trafficking, which is financially comparable with the gross domestic product of a whole number of transit countries, thus bringing them to a situation of growing violence up to a civil war.

We can witness this situation not only in Latin America, but also in the Middle East, in Western and Eastern Africa on the routes of heroin and cocaine trafficking.

Drugs are a permanent source for operation of transnational organized crime, which is the main “customer” of terroristic acts, piracy, arms and human trafficking, and which forms a parallel authority and illicit economy, and contributes to the weakening and disintegration of sovereign countries.

So it is no wonder that the global order, as well as a number of countries, suffer from systemic erosion and targeted destruction.

In this respect it is necessary to radically upgrade the status of the problem of large-scale drug production and transnational drug trafficking, putting it in line with the problems of terrorism, piracy, and nuclear non-proliferation in terms of its scope and consequences.

Therefore it is necessary to specify in all related UN documents that  large-scale drug production, which generates transnational drug trafficking, is a threat to international peace and security, and thus to substantially supplement the existing system of drug combating with new measures at the disposal of the UN Security Council.

That is why I would like to emphasize once again that our key task is to review the drug problem from the point of view of a threat to security and of enhancing the range of measures we are currently using.

At the same time our efforts must be focused on the two global centers of drug production – heroin in Afghanistan and cocaine in Latin America, which are generating up to 50 percent of all criminal revenues in the world. It must be clearly defined in the new global drug policy: no global centers – no related drug trafficking and use.

Against transnational organized crime, which has formed and is controlling those two global centers, it is necessary to use the same measures that we are applying to the leaders of terrorist organizations. Every year more than a hundred thousand people die of Afghan opiates and South American cocaine, so the people who have organized this process and are benefiting from it, must be stopped by all means.

The position I have just stated is also presented in the new Russian-Italian report "International Security Enforcement via a Global Antidrug Policy", co-authored by the well-known European politician Mr. Franco Frattini, whose presentation will take place today in the World International Center.

Thank you for your attention.