Oct 10, 2024 ｜ AFP, NUKU’ALOFA

STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’

A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters.

Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia.

This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare.

This undated handout photo received from the New Zealand Defence Force on February 8, 2023 shows the Royal New Zealand Navy vessel HMNZS Manawanui retrieving 3.2 tonnes of cocaine adrift in the Pacific in an historic drugs bust estimated to be worth around 316 million US dollars.

Photo courtesy of New Zealand Defense Force Via AFP

 

“We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan told reporters. “We have a massive ocean territory and we’ve got 176 islands that, by and large, are unprotected.”

Bricks of drugs are unloaded during stops in Pacific island ports, where they are repacked en route to lucrative markets elsewhere.

“The information coming our way is that illicit substances are coming through in general cargo that is shipped through Tonga,” McLennan said. “At the moment it’s mostly methamphetamine.”

In this photo provided by the NZ Drug Foundation, a pineapple flavored candy filled with a potentially lethal dose of methamphetamine is displayed in Auckland, New Zealand, Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024.

Methamphetamine use has become so rampant in Tonga — a nation of 105,000 people — that the Global Organized Crime Index likens it to an “epidemic.”

“It’s a problem here,” taxi driver Latimuli Taliauli, 39, told reporters as he waited for a passenger at the tumbledown Talamahu markets in Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa.

“There are some people walking around here that are damaged from the methamphetamine,” he added, pointing toward a dishevelled man staggering between rows of vegetables and local handicrafts.

Data on drug use, addiction and crime is scarce or non-existent in many of the Pacific’s developing nations, but courthouse records show a Tongan legal system clogged with drug users and dealers, from builders and mechanics to accountants and teachers.

Recent busts hint at the size of the so-called “Pacific drug highway.”

Four tonnes of methamphetamine were seized in Fiji this year, concealed in plastic-wrapped packages labeled “universal tile adhesive.”

It put Fiji on par with the “biggest” seizures reported in global methamphetamine hubs such as Thailand or Hong Kong.

Cocaine started trickling through Pacific island nations at least 20 years ago as Latin American cartels looked to feed Australia’s hunger for hard drugs.

Although Australia used only 2 percent of the world’s cocaine by volume, sky-high prices meant that by 2008 it was already the third-most lucrative market in the world, data from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime showed.

The transcontinental cocaine pipeline has in the past few years been flooded with synthetic methamphetamine and the Pacific drug trade now follows two distinct routes.

Smugglers from Latin America and the US sail through the island chains of Polynesia, en route to Tonga, Fiji and sometimes Samoa.

On the other side of the Pacific rim, drugs cooked in the jungle labs of Southeast Asia flow down through Melanesian states such as Palau and Papua New Guinea.

While cash-poor Pacific nations were only ever seen as a transit point for expensive cocaine, locals can more readily afford the cheaper, highly addictive meth.

“From what we have been gathering on the ground, it is not just in urban areas, but also in villages and rural areas,” Fijian drug outreach worker Kalesi Volatabu told reporters. “We are seeing lawlessness across the communities, in schools, and the risks and dangers in rural villages where these poisons are being spread.”

Court documents reference the murky presence of “organized and sophisticated drug cartels” in Fiji, and “international drug trafficking syndicates” in Papua New Guinea.

“The Pacific is being used by Latin American cartels, Asian syndicates and triads, Australian and New Zealand bikers, and US street gangs,” UN Office on Drugs and Crime chief of staff Jeremy Douglas said.

Global Initiative, a Geneva-based think tank, singled out Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel as “the most prominent in the arena,” while the US Department of the Treasury sanctions list the 14K triad — one of Hong Kong’s largest organized crime groups — as a major threat in Palau.

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