Cover Story

AN increase in drug trafficking is already attracting islanders into organised criminal activi ties, and some hard drugs are being offloaded for use in the richer countries of the region.

The island countries still tend to see the problem as belonging to the big drug market countries of Australia, New Zealand and the United States, but now even the smallest players are being asked to increase their financial contribution and regional commitment. They are being asked to recognise that drug trafficking and organised crime are a problem for every country in the region a problem which calls for coordinated regional effort now.

Most authorities believe islanders can not afford to buy drugs, and that “drug tourists” tend to be the only consumers.

But at least one social worker is receiving reports that hard drugs are circulating in the elite circles.

The seeds for a regional hard drug market also are being planted in what authorities recognise as the most immedi ate danger that islanders could be lured into lucrative, illegal trafficking for financial gain.

Initially payments may be made in cold, hard cash, but as large scale drug producing countries such as Latin Ame rica demonstrate, drugs often become part of payment for traffickers who become addicts or entrepreneurs ped dling to a local market.

“(Drug consumption) doesn’t concern us so much because islanders wouldn’t have the money to buy drugs. It’s not our problem. It’s a problem for New Zealand and Australia and America that’s where the market is,” according to Director of Customs and Taxes in Vanuatu, John Simbolo.

Simbolo, who is head of Customs in the country which was part of Australia’s biggest heroin bust to date, represents what seems to be a general line of thinking in the island countries that foreign aid is essential to combat drug

trafficking through the scattered

countries of the Pacific, and justified because the consumption problem is largely that of the Big Three nations.

Yet the question of local consumption hovers over the 1988 bust, in which 148 packages containing 400 g of pure heroin were found compressed in the lining of a refrigerator sent from Vanuatu to Aus tralia in 1988. Another two blocks were found inside a bus seat in Vanuatu and the individual who was arrested later took police to a tyre stuffed with heroin and concealed in bushes. The possibility remains that the heroin could have been reserved for local distribution, or a local “drug tourist” market.

Simbolo acknowledges that consump tion could be a problem in the near future.