We seem to be, as a species, extraordinarily selective about the things we believe or those that we discard from our consciousness.
There is, no doubt, an opioid problem on the streets of many major cities.
Malaysia and Singapore have the death penalty for anyone caught smuggling drugs, irrespective of the type of drug, if the quantity meets a pre-determined amount considered to be as saleable. In other words the quantity is meant to support a dealer or dealership.
Does this make a difference to the drugs available on the street?
No. It does not.
Vast quantities of drugs of all kinds are available easily everywhere. Customs officials in combined operations with the police force sometimes pick up a shipment and celebrate the discovery in the press. The media will extol the virtues of the agencies and proclaim that, “1000 kgs of drugs have been confiscated. We are winning the war on drugs!”
They are not. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the quantity that crosses the border into the country every day.
Marijuana is relatively cheap here as is MMDM (Mollies, Ice or Ecstacy). Cocaine and heroin will cost you a little more but home grown drugs like Ketum, also known as Kratom, are easily and readily available for very little cost. Indeed, if you know where to look you can go and pick the Ketum yourself, take it home, boil it and get a sort of ‘high’. Then you die if you are tempted to take the capsules.
Drugs are not the only item that smugglers focus on. Guns, for example, are a common trading item
Cigarettes, too, attract the attention of smugglers as do alcoholic spirits because of the high taxation on these items in most countries. Here the illegal importation of ‘Kretek’ is common. ‘Kretek’ is a form of cigarette made from cloves and, sometimes, other flavourings. The word is onomatopoeic word representing the sound that cloves make when they burn. Some people prefer the ‘high’ you get from nutmeg, but that is another story.
Drugs, guns, alcohol, cigarettes are all common and, depending on the situation where you live, there will be other items that will attract the attention of illegal import-export businesses. Animals. Attractive animals – especially those that are endangered, are a special target. Some animals have a medicinal value to certain ethnic groups that makes them highly valued and therefore a smuggling target.
The main animal that is shuffled around the globe are human beings.
Not unnaturally you will think of the refugee crisis in Europe as being the prime mover for people from the Middle East and Africa. They number in their thousands, certainly.
There is also a market for shifting people from Burma (Myanmar now) to safety in various countries.
Economic migrants are in every Nation where poverty or hardship exists. Sometimes the hardship is in the form of criminal activity engendered by the Governments of those countries. In this instance Zimbabwe and South Africa spring to mind but there are others governments who are equally repressive. The South African Government does not actively victimise its people but their inactivity in allowing crime to flourish places them high on the list of places to avoid. Zimbabwe, it must be said appears to be on the way to improved relationships with ethnic minorities, but we shall see what the future holds. Africa has not had a good record with governance.
Pakistan is another place where hardship and discrimination run rampant as does its neighbour, India, where being female is barely tolerable.
The hidden face of human trafficking is from places like China, Thailand, Philippines, for example.
Women, especially, are targeted for ‘special jobs overseas’ and enticed with wonderful opportunities that in reality does not exist. Instead they are shuffled off into little better than slave labour in a run-down factory somewhere. Even worse is that some of them, the better-looking ones, no doubt, end up in brothels.
Regardless of where they end up the people who enslave them will keep them shielded from the authorities. Their documentation will be withheld from them and they are often kept in poorly fed, uncomfortable and unsanitary conditions because food, comfort and sanitation cost money. It is cheaper to get another worker than it is to pay for the upkeep of the current ones.
Is this widespread? Yes. More than people like you or I would care to think.
In 2016 the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children estimated that 1 in 6 endangered runaways reported to them were likely to be sex trafficking victims. Globally, the International Labour Organisation estimates that there are 4.5 million people trapped in forced sexual exploitation.
Although people are trafficked as forced labour, there are many used for child begging and organ removal. 79% of human-trafficking is said to be sexual. Unsurprisingly the majority (but not all!) of these are women and girls. Amazingly in the countries that provide information on the gender of trafficking it is women that make up the majority of those actually doing the trafficking!
The value of this trade is reported to be around US$150 billion annually.
The top countries that traffic humans are China, Russia and Uzbekistan. They join the likes of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In China the ‘One-Child’ policy and a cultural preference for male children perpetuates the trafficking of brides and prostitutes.
In Uzbekistan, the annual cotton harvest has been the biggest human-trafficking culprit. This is the World’s sixth biggest cotton producer and, each year, local officials force thousands of children to pick cotton in order to meet quotas cheaply.
Nowhere is completely safe. Prostitution and brothels are commonplace even in countries and States where they are deemed to be illegal.
Forced labour exists everywhere that a product needs to be made cheaply in order to be competitive.
Organs are needed constantly and need to be harvested from someone, somewhere.
How do you stop it?
In practice you do not. Perhaps, somewhat altruistically, you can make a dent in it by following the tips from the ‘The Muse’:
The main way to tackle it is to make people aware that it exists and not to wander around wearing blinkers.
If you see something suspicious – report it.
If it is not suspicious then no harm is done, but if it is suspicious then you will have played your part in attempting to stamp out this heinous problem!
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