The Mask of JanusILLEGAL DRUGS:

Policy, Politics & Prejudice

C.S.J. Fazey

Visiting Professor of International Drug Policy

School of Law and Social Justice Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology

University of Liverpool

Janus – the Roman god who looked two ways at once

Basic premise of this lecture:

Governments have consistently supported one policy whilst encouraging or even

actively pursuing its opposite

Evidence well-researched & available but I also bring a unique personal perspective through years of face-to-

face experience on the international stage

Personal Perspective

• 45 years experience in the field• Started research into heroin addicition and treatment in

1966• 1990-1998: UN International Drug Control Programme,

Vienna• First Chief of Demand Reduction• Inter-regional Advisor on Demand Reduction• Drafted UN Declaration on Guilding Principles of

Demand Reduction• Led Secretariat to steer Declaration through UN system

to its approval by the General Assembly in 1998

The Shanghai Conference, 1909

• First attempt to control opium trade

• Theoretically supposed to save Chinese & Filipino people from evils of opium use

• But underlying reality was US desire to break near-monopoly of UK on trade with China

Hague Convention 1912-14

• First international attempt to control production & movement of narcotic drugs

• Ratified by being added to the Treaty of Versailles at end of First World War

• UK largely ignored the treaty

• Geneva meeting to resolve issues led to Geneva Convention of 1924

• Unintended consequence – cannabis ban damaged rope-making (and UK trade)

Allied invasion of Sicily 1943

• Facilitated by Lucky Luciano & Mafia to ensure minimal US casualties

• Mafia had been successfully suppressed by Mussolini

• US rewarded Luciano by allowing Mafia to re-establish its power

• Meyer Lansky then established Mafia’s international banking network

The French Connection

• US fears after Communists won local power in Marseiile

• US supported Union Corse to break strikes and fix elections

• Les Barbouze gangsters became virtually immune from prosecution

• Set up French Connection drug production and trafficking network

All downhill from here…

• French in Viet Nam

• US in Viet Nam

• Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

• Insurgents ‘paid’ via opium farming

• Asia becomes world’s largest producer of illegal opium / heroin

• Trade in illegal opium/heroin & cannabis goes global

Cannabis in mass production

Happy workers in Kandahar’s largest industry

Scraping a living in Helmland

Transportation logistics to the fore

Buy a commercial pleasureSubmarine….

…or build your own in the jungle

Pedigree pups are turned into mules

Afghanistan:

An alternative

view

Methodological implications

• What does it mean to study a Janus-faced phenomena, one that points in many directions and presents many different faces at once?

• Taking opium/heroin as the example, understanding the present situation means tracing the activities of buyers, sellers, governments and the shifting relationships between them in and across a range of different contexts as they have developed over time

• The methodological approach is therefore simultaneously synchronic and diachronic

Methodological implications

• Analytically this means examining such things as:– National, international and supranational politics– The influence of events (such as the unforeseen shifts

in alliances that accompanied processes of colonisation and decolonisation)

– And the role of national intelligence agencies, organised crime and war, and much more besides

• It is only when armed with this wealth of data from different levels that it is possible to map the complex spatial, temporal and political formations that serve to channel the flow of heroin/opium from producers in nations such as Afghanistan to consumers in Europe and North America.

Methodological implications

• In tracking a phenomenon that presents different faces and extends over space and time, extensive archival and investigative research is crucial as is gaining access to first-hand experience (personally or through others)

• An area as complex as drug trade and drug policy requires investigators to have the breadth of knowledge to pursue the ways in which developments in different domains reciprocally influence each other in unpredictable ways.

Methodological implications

• Not isolated researchers but part of an international group whose work offers sources of confirmation/disconfirmation

• Important to recognise the strange politics of research: declassified US documents as a set of clues for reconstructing greater wholes