Illegal drugs

Home-grown highs

The narcotics business is changing from an international trade to a local affair

Jun 23rd 2011 | MEXICO CITY | from the print edition

LIKE all canny entrepreneurs, drug dealers have a knack for branding their goods with evocative names. Moroccan kif, Nepalese ganja and Bolivian marching powder—such labels add cosmopolitan glamour to a seedy business. Yet according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), published on June 23rd, changes in consumption patterns and production techniques mean that the trade is becoming less globalised—and somewhat less alluring.

Climatic conditions still dictate where some drugs are grown. Virtually all the world’s cocaine comes from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Three-quarters of global opium production is in Afghanistan, with Myanmar and Mexico making up most of the balance. But cannabis plants, by far the world’s most popular illegal drug, are as happy in a Western window box as on a Himalayan hillside. Likewise, synthetic drugs—amphetamine, methamphetamine and ecstasy, plus a growing list of new potions—can be cooked up in factories anywhere (and increasingly with harmless ingredients: researchers at Harvard University are trying to make lysergic acid, the basis for LSD and many other pharmaceuticals, from baker’s yeast).

It is these mobile drugs that are now increasing in popularity. In America, where cannabis consumption had been falling, the UNODC has spotted a “resurgence”. More than three in ten 18-year-olds and more than one in eight 14-year-olds now use it. American teenagers, after a period of indifference, have also rediscovered ecstasy. In Western Europe cannabis consumption is stable, but it has increased in the continent’s east, as also in Latin America. Asia has seen a rise in the use of synthetic stimulants, now the world’s most popular illegal highs after cannabis.

This industrialisation of production brings new problems. Cultivating cannabis in factories tends to improve its quality, which partially explains why stronger varieties have become more widespread. In America average concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient, doubled in the 1990s, as growers focused on stronger, more expensive cannabis. Synthetic-drug laboratories have begun to market new—and in many places still unregulated—“legal highs”, such as piperazines and mephedrone (banned last year in the European Union).

This new localism has made life more comfortable for dealers, because they have been able to shorten their supply chains. Most cannabis is now grown in its country of consumption, according to the report. In Japan the number of arrests for domestic cannabis cultivation increased by 17% in 2009, whereas the number of arrests for importing fell by almost half. Sixty countries now report synthetic-drug factories on their territory. More than 10,000 were shut down in 2009, mostly in the United States. But they sprang up in Asia, too: China discovered 391, Indonesia 35—a record. In fact, Indonesia may now have replaced Europe as the main supplier of ecstasy to South East Asia, reckons the UNODC.

By contrast, countries in Latin America and Asia, that have so far supplied the rich world with most drugs, may welcome the shift to local production. The cocaine route from the Andes to America has brought mayhem to regions along the way, first in Mexico and now in Central America. If gringos switch from cocaine to home-grown drugs, many in Latin America will breathe a sigh of relief.