The production of cannabis resin (also known as\ hashish) is also largely concentrated in North Africa (Morocco), besides central Asia, according to U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime. And the route of trafficking in cannabis resin is significantly inter-regional. from
North Africa (Morocco) to West and Central Europe.

Morocco, the north African country, which was the biggest supplier of hashish in the world, has now cut production of the crop by almost 50% over the past three years. The Moroccan government had said it plans to completely eradicate cannabis by 2008.

However, Khalid Zerouali, an official of the Moroccan Interior Ministry, said Europe’s seemingly insatiable demand for cannabis is
still the main obstacle to eradicating it completely, according to a BBC report las year.
A total of 17 African countries reported rising levels of cannabis use in 2005, and only 4 countries saw a decline; a further 4 countries described the cannabis situation as stable. As compared to a year earlier, the upward trend appears to have lost at least some of its momentum. For 2004, 20 countries saw cannabis use rising, only 3 reported a decline and 4 reported stabilization, according to the World Drug Report 2007 by UNODC.

Cannabis, another kind of drug raw material like opium, is creating harm to people via a production, processing, trafficking route similar to opium, again, originating from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Abuse of Cannabis is hurting people of the production and trafficking countries.

However, the situation seems to be worse than opium although productions of cannabis in some traditional production countries are falling.

Cannabis is now the largest illicit drug market by far, including roughly 160 million annual consumers, according to the 2007 World Drug Report 2007 by U.N. Office of Drug and Crime. The widespread nature of production and consumption make it very difficult to define and quantify. Reports received by UNODC suggest that cannabis production is taking place in at least 172 countries and territories.

Hashish (more commonly called hash) is a potent form of cannabis produced by collecting and processing the most potent material that female marijuana plants naturally generate as part of their growth cycle.Like marijuana, hashish is usually smoked or eaten. Hashish is intoxicating and can produce euphoria and other feelings similar to marijuana but the effect is stronger.Hashish is an illegal substance in the United States and many other counties with no accepted medical use.

Part of the production of cannabis resin (also known as hashish) is concentrated in the South-West Asia/Middle East region, particularly
in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the 2007 World Drug Report 2007 by U.N. Office of Drug and Crime. Cannabis is a major drug of abuse in Pakistan. In a hospital based study, conducted at DHQ Hospital, Faisalabad, in patients admitted between 1996-2001, it was found that cannabis was the most frequently used drug of abuse, according to a study published last year on
Journal of College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan.

Cannabis herb remains the most widely trafficked substance in terms of volume and geographic spread, according to U.N. South-West Asia (mainly Pakistan) to Europe (mainly the Netherlands); from Central Asia to East Europe (notably the Russian Federation) are two of the many trafficking export routes of cannabis around the globe.

Iran drug users may have only one country to blame for their addiction: its neighboring Afghanistan. While Afghanistan people
easily fell to addiction of opium because of the country’s dominant production capacity of the plant in the world, Iranians get addicted due to the flow of drugs from Afghanistan to European countries.

Iran has one of the world’s highest rates of opiate addiction and it is getting worse although Iran grows almost none of its own opium, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). The organization’s 2007 World Drug Report classified Iran as having one of the world’s largest increases in opiate addiction, and the government estimates there are 1.2 million drug abusers, which is 2.8 percent of people ages 15 to 64.

Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s opium poppy crop was largely eradicated though some minor residual amounts may be grown on a non-commercial scale, UNDOC said on its website.

However, Opiate consumption is increasing in the countries surrounding Afghanistan: Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia, according to UNODC’s 2007 world drug report. This may be due to the importance of Iran as a drug trafficking rout and a drug processing place. The 2007 drug report said Large seizures of morphine in some neighbouring countries (notably Pakistan and Iran) suggested that significant amounts of morphine are still being processed into heroin in countries outside Afghanistan.

In my last post “Across the US/Mexican Border”, I talked about how Mexicans are desperate to cross the border illegally hoping their great American dream will one day come true.  However, many end up being poor and exploited, feeling out of place and void of hope.

By devoting all their energy into working for the “globalized factories”, many of these young people have given up their hope of higher education which, ironically, is the very thing that can lift them from poverty.  According to Cardona, the average education level of citizens in Juarez is 7.7 years.  With the constantly expanding lower class, drug dealers, traffickers and all other kinds of criminals are found just about everywhere.In the photo exhibition, a section called “Casa de la Muerte”, or the House of the Dead, at least seven people, including three US citizens, were killed in one house. Police believed that local criminal rings were the culprits, and the xenophobia causing such violence has alarmed US Immigration and Customs enforcement agencies.  

The sad fact is that, many of these “globalized factories” are in fact products of free trade agreements that the US has signed with Mexico over the years.  During the debate over the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, advocates assured the US and Mexican public that that the agreement would greatly alleviate unauthorized migration by increasing unemployment opportunities in Mexico and closing the gap between US and Mexican wages. The trade agreement was meant to help Mexicans develop their economies.  However, whether consciously or unconsciously, these US corporations turned out to be at least partly responsible for the poverty Mexicans face today. 

According to a report on Global Exchange, an NGO based in California, the value of the Mexican minimum wage dropped 20 percent in the first decade after the agreement was signed, and the price of bread rose more than 500 percent. The increase in Mexican poverty has led to a drastic increase in internal migration, especially from the countryside to the city, aggravating problems of its own.  

On the economic side, Jim Hightower, an US activist, suggested that huge agribusiness operations in Mexico, many owned by US investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmers less than US$2 per hour.  Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as aggressive US chains have started to move in one after another.  US corporations now control 40 per cent of the country’s formal jobs, with Wal-Mart being the No. 1 employer.

Sophisticated laboratories inside Afghanistan are now converting 90 percent of the country’s opium into heroin and morphine before smuggling it around the world, the United Nations said, cited by an AFP report last year..The report said Afghanistan had until three years ago exported the illicit drug almost exclusively in its raw form, according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The AFP report quoted UNODC representative Christina Oguz as saying at the time that ‘the amount of the opium being processed (in Afghanistan) is around 90 percent — at least the lion’s share, Oguz also said the annual income from the drugs trade — more than three billion US dollars — helps finance the Taliban-led insurgency plaguing mainly southern and eastern Afghanistan.

AFP reported in August 27 that a day before Afghan and coalition troops had destroyed a heroin laboratory after battling Taliban
fighters guarding the facility, citing a coalition statement. The lab in Helmand contained large amounts of opium-processing chemicals as well as weapons, insurgent propaganda and explosive materials, the statement said.

According to a Bloomberg report in February this year, British and Afghan troops had seized a ton of opium and 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of heroin powder as part of an effort to cut off funding for Taliban insurgents.

The seisure of heroin was made north of the town of Sagin in the southern Helmand province, the report said. It added that the seisure of the drugs came after coalition soldiers fought with a large number” of insurgents, who tried to protect the drug lab with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence said in a statement at the time.

It seems that the US-Mexican border has caught the interest of many photographers lately. 

When Irish photographer Richard Moss drove along the border, he noticed a rucksack sitting on the side of the road.  He stopped and looked inside, where he found keys, toothpaste, cards for an English language course and a Bible in Spanish.  It was then that he realized they were personal effects abandoned by a woman who had crossed the border illegally.  For fear of being caught, she didn’t dare to return to collect the things she’d left behind, even though those are presumably most of all that the poor illegal immigrant had. This abandoned rucksack inspired Mosse to work on a photo project tentatively called “Nothing to Declare”.  He walked along the border and looked for artifacts left behind when people had to drop everything and ran.  The images are striking: toys and a page torn from a children’s book, a bag of marbles, a plastic jar of water, a damaged seat from a car…

The popular video-sharing website Youtube also features a slideshow showing Mexican illegal immigrants being questioned at the border.  Other pictures are even more striking images of how they jump over barbed wires to cross the border, step on one another to overcome the tall wall separating their home and what they think is dreamland, or hide themselves in vehicles to escape police or customs search.  Another short video shows how kids and teenagers are trying to jump over the fence to reach the other side of the border.

“We’ve replaced steaks with cornflakes.  We can’t afford to get sick.  Our kids can’t afford health insurance.  We hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can’t afford a new one.  Our kids can’t buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant.  Our purchasing power continually regresses, and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing”, said an anonymous working Mexican illegal immigrant in a recent letter to the editor.

So, why don’t we start developing genuine grass-roots investment policies that give Mexicans both an ability and an incentive to remain in their homeland?  Rebuilding the middle-class ladder will be the best way to remove the need to migrate from Mexico in search for a “better life”.  Instead of risking their life in quest of the “great American dream”, they will then be able to realize their own “great Mexican dream”.  

According to Organs Watch, a task force of scientists and transplant surgeons who have launched a global investigation on organ trafficking, at least 15,000 human kidneys a year are sold and obtained through organ trafficking.  Out of this 15,000 kidney “transactions”, many have been done through coercion, where victims of human trafficking are drugged before their healthy kidneys are forcefully removed, or the ignorant “donors” were told their kidney has failed and so has to be removed, only to discover later that their kidney has been transplanted to someone else with enough money to pay for the organ and the surgery.

In the age of globalization, countries are no longer as separated from one another as they used to be by sheer geographical distance.  International travel has been made more convenient and enables people to cross the globe quickly and easily.  The sophisticated medical technology that allows any organs to be cheaply transplanted, together with the increasing disparities between the richest and the poorest on the planet, has also brought about a wave of “transplant tourists”. 

Patients in need of organ transplant from Europe, the US and the richer parts of the Middle East are flocking to private Pakistani and Indian hospitals for operations which can be arranged in days at a fraction of the cost back home.  This illegal trade of human organs means that disadvantaged individuals are reduced to the role of “organ suppliers” for those who have the cash to pay.

The flow of these “transplant tourists” mirrors the typical movement of “goods” moving from the poorer parts of the world to the richer parts, and the movement of money in the other way round.  On the one side of this trade, there is tremendous poverty; and on the other side, desperation on the part of patients who need the organs. 

However, despite the lower cost and shorter waiting time, obtaining an organ transplant from the other side of the globe may not be such a good idea after all—both for the donor and the recipient.  When there is no biological link between the donor and receiver, doctors are often forced to use dangerous techniques to reduce the chance of the recipient’s body rejecting the organ. 

“Agents that slow the immunity system are required to prevent rejection, usually they are very harmful to the patient’s future in the long run, making him or her more susceptible to other diseases”, renal surgeon Dr. Zein al-Moswi said.

And for the donors, it does not need mentioning that the transplant’s harmful effects on them are more obvious.  The one kidney left is sure to be put under huge pressure and would eventually fail.  Given the poor diet and lack of medical facilities in the poorer countries, the health of these donors will be put at great risk. 

In fact, the scale of the “organ transplant business” is so huge that governments in both receiving and donating countries are beginning to take note. 

After participating in the fourth meeting of the Monitoring Authority for Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues, the Pakistani Health Ministry announced in late February that donation of organs would be allowed only by blood relatives of the potential receiver.  Severe action would be taken against hospitals and other health institutions found involved in illegal organ trade.

A renowned kidney surgeon who admitted to arranging organ transplants for patients from all over the world was arrested in Chennai, India, late last year.  Since then, the New Delhi government has speeded up a major mass media campaign to bring about a change in people’s behaviour to raise awareness of illegal organ transplant in the country.

In late February, Canadian MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj has proposed Bill C-500 which seeks to penalize any Canadian citizen who participates in illegal organ transplant, no matter where in the world the transplant takes place.  If the Bill is passed, all transplant recipients will have to obtain a certificate establishing that the organ is donated or obtained legally and that no money was involved in the donation. 

On the other hand, medics in Iran, where kidney trade has been legalized, are preaching that market forces will make sure that people in need of money and those in need of a healthy organ would be matched up effectively. 

They are echoed by increasing calls urging governments worldwide to promote awareness and encourage voluntary organ donation as a first step onto the road of mandatory organ donation if possible. 

Encouraging voluntary donation may not be a bad idea, but for mandatory organ donation, local cultural sensibilities and economic circumstances have to be taken into consideration.  No matter how effective a solution it might sound, there are indeed cases where compulsory organ donation does not work.  In Brazil, everyone is declared a universal organ donor at birth, meaning that once they die, any useful organs will be donated to other in need without prior consent of the deceased or his/her family.  For many of its people who find it hard to make ends meet, the possibility of selling an organ before they die seems like an act of empowerment.  Under extreme poverty, somehow it makes sense for them to prefer to sell their body organs for money to be used in their lifetime, rather than to let the state get it free when they die. 

Many Afghanistan refugees refused to leave Pakistan and return to their home county, so does the opium that are growing near the border and the trafficking of drugs.

Opium production in Afghanistan is at an all-time high, particularly near the Pakistan border, according to the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2008 released by the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs [INL] in March this year.

The report said that since poppy cultivation continued to rise in Afghanistan, Pakistan remained a significant transit country of
heroin, morphine, opium, and hashish, and is a conduit to Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, East Asia, and Africa by land and sea.

Pakistan’s position as a major drug transit country has fueled domestic addiction, the U.S. INL said in the report, especially in
areas of poor economic opportunity and physical isolation. The GOP estimates that they have two to three million drug addicts in the total population of 162 million, although no accurate figure exists.

However, as the drug comes from Afghanistan, most of the addicted drug users are also from the neighboring Afghanistan.

According to a IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) report at the end of March, many of the 1.5 million Afghans dotted around Pakistan’s urban centers have faced prolonged hardship and are vulnerable to drug addiction. Many have no jobs, or work as the lowest paid members of the workforce.

These people’s situation and vulnerability is no different from their countrymen back in the homeland.

Afghanistan is only part of the drug traffic link, although the most important as the origin of the raw opium. However, not only the poor people in Afghanistan are the victim of the cheap raw opium, Iran and Pakistan are also falling along being the neighbors of the world’s largest opium producer.

Mohammad Yusuf, a doctor at a drug rehabilitation centre in Charikar, capital of Parwan Province, northern Afghanistan, said most addicts they treated had picked up the habit in Iran or Pakistan where they were refugees, according to a IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) report. The two victims cited by the report both get addicted to the opium with a hope to alleviate the tiredness after a day’s hard work.

Pakistan is more than a country housing refugees from Afghanistan, and Afghanistan also no longer only producing raw material. Drug labs operating within Afghanistan process an increasingly large portion of the country’s raw opium into heroin and morphine base, according to the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2008 released by the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs [INL].

This process has reduced the bulk of raw opium about one-tenth, which facilitates its movement to markets in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East with transit routes through Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asia, the March 2008 report said.

According to the report, Opiates are then transported to Turkey, Russia, and the rest of Europe by organized criminal groups that are often organized along regional and ethnic kinship lines. Pakistani nationals play a prominent role in all aspects of the drug trade along the Afghan/Pakistan border.

The INL report showed that Pakistan is now on the frontline of the war against drugs as a major transit country for opiates and hashish from neighboring Afghanistan. In 2007, there was frequent conflict between militants and Pakistani forces near the border with Afghanistan, said INL.

Pakistan saw an increase of poppy cultivation in 2007. Roughly 2,315 ha were cultivated in 2007 compared to cultivation of approximately 1,908 ha in 2006, according to the report.

Women religious and prostitutes have long been considered to be standing at the two extreme ends of the women spectrum.  In recent years, however, they have been increasingly bonded together by the former’s Samaritan mission to help the victims of human trafficking, and the latter’s desperation to seek help to end their plight.

A Conference was held in Rome late last year to explore the roles of women religious in fighting human trafficking.  It was funded by the US Department of State and was organized by the US Embassy to the Vatican and the Italian Union of Major Superiors.