British investigators at Police Commissioner's Old Hope Road headquarters.
Ross Sheil, Staff Reporter
AS SENIOR Scotland Yard detective Mark Shields arrives to take up his post in the Jamaica Constabulary Force, it seems Britain is meeting its responsibility to solve a very British and very international problem.
Britain's senior policeman, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair, put the weight of the narcotics debate on affluent recreational users. He said that as with any trade between the First and Third worlds, from Jamaican-produced sugar cane to transhipped cocaine, there has been inequality but now Britain is bearing its share of responsibility.
While Jamaican 'drug mules' serve time in British prisons - where a quarter of foreign prisoners are Jamaicans - James Hewitt, the former lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, escaped with just a caution upon his arrest on suspicion of taking cocaine. When asked to comment on Hewitt, Sir Ian simply offered, "I don't like that."
He disavowed the excuse that theirs was a harm-free habit, promising to make an example of them, "I'm not interested in what harm it is doing to them personally," he argued. "But the price of that cocaine is misery on the streets of London's [housing] estates and blood on the roads to Colombia and Afghanistan." [And Jamaica.]
In Britain the stereotype of a drug dealer has long been the Jamaican 'yardie', armed and a threat to polite society. With the crack cocaine epidemic came guns and the inner cities, already recovering from the early-80s race riots, now faced a rapid rise in drug-fuelled violent crime.
DRUG CULTURE IN THE 60S
British drug culture had begun back in the 1960s with the 'hippies', - 'pot' (marijuana) and 'acid'. Marijuana was not yet widely available and the more liberal-minded first experienced the drug, thanks to the Windrush (a passenger ship service from the Caribbean to Britain) and their fascination with the more vibrant Caribbean culture.
Cocaine use began to flourish in the 1980s, typically associated with the new 'yuppie' class of young money-motivated professionals. Towards the end of the decade, acid and then ecstasy played an important role in the exploding rave scene; a euphoric experience shared by thousands of young people at large parties across the country.
This increasingly relaxed attitude to recreational drug use embraced the year-long, 'softly, softly' marijuana experiment pioneered in the London borough of Lambeth by Chief Superintendent Brian Paddick in 2001-2002. Under the experiment those caught in possession of the drug were let off with a warning (the drug was later reclassified from class B to C by the government).
Lambeth, most specifically Brixton, had long been perceived as a place to buy drugs by non-locals and intense national and international media coverage attracted more buyers to the area. However, many in the area's large African-Caribbean population resented the added stigma, dealers and buyers the experiment brought to their community. For outsiders looking to find drugs, a black man with dreadlocks typified a dealer.
Mr. Paddick broke with police policy in expressing his sympathy for recreational drug users. "They use a small amount of this drug, a lot of them just at weekends," he said. "It has no adverse effect on the rest of the people that they are with."
In an article on the BBC website titled 'Canapés and cocaine', dated February 10, 2005, a 36-year-old marketing executive and mother of two excuses her habit. "It is the accepted - and often expected - thing in my crowd. I know doctors, barristers and teachers who do it."
But with last year's murder rate of 1,445 (many of them drug-related killings), would British consumers attribute Jamaican deaths to their 'comfortable lifestyles? Is it a simple system of supply on British demand?
There is a growing public awareness that not only do drugs damage those in the country of demand but also fuel violence in producing and transhipment countries. Britain has long recorded some of the highest rates of drug use and addiction in Europe costing the country - 10 billion pounds sterling to 18 billion pounds sterling per year.
By 1998 Britain had a fully-fledged gun culture strongly associated with Jamaican gangs. In recognition of this black-on-black gun violence brought by the cocaine and crack cocaine, Scotland Yard launched Operation Trident in 1998.
TRIDENT OFFICERS
Trident officers are identifiable by their uniforms as separate from mainstream police. The logic being that on a police raid community members will recognise Trident officers and identify with their objectives in the community. Trident has a staff of 300 officers and 70 support staff, operating as an autonomous unit from Scotland Yard.
Under Trident murders fell by 50 per cent from 24 in 2002-2003 to 12 in 2003-2004; 333 firearms were seized in the period. Trident solved 14 murders during the year; an overall success rate of 118 per cent as it also solved murders from previous years. Police attribute the clear up to an increased willingness among the public to come forward with information.
Looking abroad, as the United States has done before, Britain is working to limit the supply of drugs before it reaches its shores. Britain's relationship with Jamaica is, so far, the most significant example of this not least because an estimated 20 per cent of cocaine in Britain comes via Jamaica.
The installation of highly sensitive Ionscan scanners at Jamaican airports under Operation Airbridge has been attributed to the prevention of drug mules breaching British borders. In 2003, the number of drug mules caught before boarding flights in Jamaica rose by 100 per cent while arrests at the British end dropped by 75 per cent.
Britain paid for the scanners following the arrival of a British Airways flight on December 12, 2002, which carried 16 drug mules from Jamaica together with £250,000 worth of cocaine. Two people died in the same year when bags of cocaine burst in their stomachs.
CO-OPERATION HAS PAID
As part of Operation Kingfish two Royal Navy ships, working with Jamaican and U.S. coastguards have seized 36 speedboats and 14 tons of crack cocaine since last October. Co-operation has paid dividends.
As British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell said: "This is not just about altruism. Clearly we want to help countries scarred by drugs but we are helping ourselves as well."
