Governments around the world may find themselves at odds over political matters, but there are certain subjects on which common sense alone, dictates they should never fail to cooperate. And one of the most crucial is drugs.
Thus it borders on the incomprehensible that Russia has abandoned a ten-year policy of working with the United States on combating the scourge of the international drugs trade.
Since Vladimir Putin swapped places with Dmitry Medvedev and moved from the premiership back into the Kremlin as president, relations with Washington have been deteriorating. In particular Moscow has clamped down on Western Non-Governmental Organizations, many of which were busy promoting the democracy which Putin seems intent on rolling back in Russia.
The Americans have hardly been less provocative. Congress last year passed the so-called Magnitsky bill, which bars entry into the United States of any Russian officials, merely suspected of human rights violations. It also froze any US assets that these individuals might have. Moscow reciprocated with a similar ban on US officials that it suspects of human rights offenses, which in the circumstances seems fair, though the Americans are furious.
Less justified was Putin’s block on US citizens adopting Russian orphans. His country has many orphanages crammed with children who have lost or been abandoned by their parents. Any family, wherever they are in the world, prepared to welcome these kids into their home, treat them with love and respect and give them an education and a decent start in life, ought to be welcomed. Thus the US adoption ban seems both mean-spirited and deeply unfair and inconsiderate to Russian orphan children.
However this is nothing compared with Putin’s folly in tearing up an agreement with the United States, that in large measure provided US resources to help the Russian authorities clamp down on drug abuse throughout the country. In making the announcement, Putin said that the arrangement no longer addressed “realities” and had “exhausted its potential.” On the face of it, this is rubbish.
Though statistics are hard to find, and what figures that are given, may betray the political interests of those providing them, there is no doubt that Russia has a serious addiction problem. Human Rights Watch claims that there are at least three million regular drug users in the country and possibly twice that number. It says however that it cannot be sure how many of these people are completely addicted, normally to heroin, brought in from Afghanistan.
One real source of genuine disagreement between Russian anti-drugs officials and their US counterparts has been over a needle exchange program, which avoids addicts contracting HIV and other diseases. For the Russians, such an approach is tantamount to condoning drug use. This is further reflected in their reluctance to run US-style rehabilitation programs designed to wean addicts from drugs, by giving them ever-smaller doses of chemical substitutes.
Regardless of the merits of either approach, the US-Russian drugs accord had an equally important component, which was the provision of intelligence on the movement of narcotics into Russia, most especially from Afghanistan. While US intelligence resources are not foolproof — as witness the flow of narcotics into the United States through Mexico — it has to be that they contributed some value to efforts of the Russian police and frontier authorities to intercept, some at least, of the shipments being smuggled into the country.
At a stroke, it appears that Putin is prepared to throw away this assistance, tear up the drugs cooperation accord with Washington and surely make life easier for the Russian mafias who deal in narcotics. Some may even wonder if the powerful figures who run the country’s crime gangs and who have long been rumored to be close to the Kremlin, did not actually have something to do with the ending of American input to Russia’s the war on drugs.
Nor should it be thought that this is purely a Russian matter. International mafias do not respect frontiers, any more than they do laws. The increased profits from their Russian drugs trade will be invested elsewhere in the world, in the production of more drugs and in the creation of more addicts and the destruction of more families. This is the terrible price the rest of the world may be obliged to pay for the rising political tension between Moscow and Washington. Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama need to get real and find a way to save the key parts of their anti-drugs accord which combat the merchants of death, the Mafias who profit so hugely from their trade in narcotics.
Putin’s drugs war error
