to the criminological literature, "the basic goal in penitentiaries, is to
create conditions for the social adaptation of persons after their prison
term is over.» All these sources of knowledge should be made instrumental
in combating drug abuse.
At the government level, interdepartmental programs involving a wide
range of experts and the media should be worked out and implemented on
educational and prophylactic campaign among the population.
Foreign Experience in Prophylactics:
Foreign experience deserves attention in this respect. Poland, for one,
attaches great significance to public anti-drug addiction campaigns.
Specialists are convinced that drug abuse should be addressed by the public
organizations and individuals, among them - well known scientists, artists,
writers, and clerics.
The catholic church plays a special role. Maximilian Conbeg's Society
has all parishes offered to its program of temperance, urging them to
abstain not only from drugs but also from all unnatural desires. The
program has been backed across the board. Each diocese has priests
specially trained to render professional aid to drug addicts and to help
them return to society.
The Catholic University offers a course of lectures, which are to help
drug addicts; the newly organized Drug Prevention Society has basic
activities coinciding with that of the government and its main tasks are to
treat drug addicts, return them to society and prevent drug-related crimes.
The Society provides therapy for drug afflicted persons, and
recommendations on how to regain the healthy way of life. The Polish
Psychiatrists' Society has an anti-drug addiction commission, pursuing
mainly scientific objectives.
The Monar youth movement immensely contributes to the anti-drug
campaign sparing no effort to return drug addicts to society by interacting
with medics. Religious and public organizations are actively involved in
anti-narcotics campaigns in other countries, too.
At the same time, it is only within the framework of a government-
sponsored program that all issues, pertaining to the destruction of drug-
bearing crops, must be addressed. For that it is necessary to create
independent agencies, furnished with advanced equipment, aircraft, motor
vehicles and other means. Such agencies can be allowed appropriate
functions only after clearance by a team of ecological experts. Here in,
strict criminal responsibility must be enforced for carrying out such
actions that destroy the environment and harm flora and fauna. There must
be compensation.
The solution of this issue depends upon the possibility of deploying
the armed forces. In the USA the army plays a key role in monitoring drug
trafficking routes. The Defense Department carries out the following
measures against criminal narco-business:
- searching for drug-bearing crops, secret laboratories, storages and
drug distribution points;
- discovering and destroying sources of producing drugs (cocaine,
marijuana, etc);
- putting under control all possible routes of smuggling drugs into the
country (by sea, by air, across land border);
- assisting state law-enforcement agencies in exposing the channels of
drug proliferation by using intelligence sensors and photo equipment in
border territories;
- coordinating operations to intercept ships and aircraft, suspected of
illegal drugs shipment;
- patrolling the coast by interceptor planes, ships, posting radars,
balloon systems to monitor low-flying objects, etc.;
- measures to get enlisted and non-enlisted army personnel cut drugs
consumption.
In 1990, the military, using search equipment, capable of locating
submerged cables and pipelines, discovered an underground tunnel at the
border with Mexico, a tunnel through which huge consignments of drugs were
smuggled into the USA. In the last few years, four anti-narcotics
techniques have been in focus: computerized systems, advanced means of
communication, field laboratory analyzers, remote chemical detectors (photo-
acoustic and laser spectroscopes for locating specific drug production
sites.) Experts regard as promising instruments for checking baggage and
cargo containers. These instruments operate on nonlinear radar principles.
Organization of Comprehensive Studies:
By combining the efforts of scientists and experts it would be possible
to avoid haste with setting up new creative teams and, instead, apply to
the database for information, learn its source and its author, and decide
whether it's simpler to use it rather than carry out studies anew. Such an
approach would be quite beneficial for those whose work has so far been
wasted and for those who urgently need scientific information.
This would also speed up the process of solving a number of drug
problems by cutting the time for scientific research and decreasing
inevitable material costs.
Functions of the Head Branch of the Anti-narcotics Agency:
Changes in the given situation call for an appropriate effective
response, a revision of the content and volume of work, correction of
functions carried out at the departmental level.
Particularly responsible is the role of the head branch of the agency
integrated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs which studies, analyzes,
sums up and monitors information on narcotics in the country, informs
appropriate institutions and departments about it, sets priorities in
actions against narcotics, adopts measures to attain them, and carries out
other managerial functions. This agency also arranges and takes part in
concrete anti-narcotics campaigns. These include measures to prevent the
illegal growth of drug-bearing crops (plan, organize, and carry out POPPY
operations, etc.); to curb theft of drugs and highly effective medicinal
substances; discover underground laboratories (develop, plan and carry out
Doping operations); uncover the most sophisticated crimes (by taking direct
part in investigative and search actions upon arrival on site, providing
methodological, informational and technical aid); expose persons and
criminal gangs with inter-regional and international narco-business links;
join other services in carrying out preventive operations at airports,
railway stations, customs offices to detain criminals, check the baggage,
eliminate drug trafficking channels; upgrade work toward preventing and
exposing drug-related crimes.
The volume of applicable law measures at this level bears a selective
nature, being many inferiors to the volume of managerial and other
functions. It would be more rational and effective however to rid these
branches completely of any forms of direct involvement in preventing,
exposing, and curbing crimes and thereby extend managerial functions by
raising demands for professional leadership and service management by
augmenting the staff functions of these branches and limiting their role in
exposing and curbing crimes to appropriate qualified essential methods and
effective control.
Perfecting Internal Affairs Ministry Work:
To make law-enforcement agencies anti-drug trafficking activity more
efficient, the Internal Affairs Ministry could:
- draft comprehensive anti-drug addiction programs;
- perfect the departmental normative basis, create methods and analysis
teaching aids and video-films;
- participate in the work to bring republican anti-narcotics
legislation in line with the international acts;
- create a normative-legal basis to ensure a mechanism for bilateral
and multilateral international cooperation;
- work out, create, and introduce in day-to-day activity a mechanism of
control over the emerging narcotic situation and coordinate reaction to its
changes;
- adopt measures to provide the branches with appropriate equipment and
special devices;
- create automated information-search systems with wide-ranging
possibilities to combat criminal narco-business;
- set out short and long term guidelines;
- determine resources for the target-oriented organizational,
informative, promptly investigative and material-technical support of areas
with widespread drug abuse and rampant crime;
- control the formation of local branches and their activities;
- organize interaction between law-enforcement (police) agencies,
serving at areas where drugs are grown, trafficked, and consumed;
- coordinate various branches' activity to carry out joint measures
toward exposing criminal gangs with inter-regional contacts and carrying
out prophylactic measures on air, sea, river, and auto transport;
- form computer data banks on drug trafficking at republican and
international levels;
- follow the USA and other countries' experience in setting up special
mobile units, armed with the most advanced military hardware and teach
methods and ecologically safe technologies of drug crops' destruction;
- promote law-enforcement (police) agencies' cooperation with customs,
national security agencies, army and border troops;
- educate territorial agencies on various methods of work;
- plan cooperation with foreign agencies in preventing drugs and raw
material for narcotics from being smuggled in from other regions practicing
a specific form of controllable supplies envisaged by the 1988 UN
Convention and exert control over such cooperation;
- organize and control scientific research and apply it;
- to study, sum up, and apply positive foreign experience;
One should bear in mind that the campaign against narcotics is part of
the universal action against organized crime. Efficiency at the local level
makes it possible to expose not only drug-related crimes but also felonies,
especially those involving violence and theft.
If all these organizational measures are put into practice, the
campaign against narcotics in the Russian Federation will be more
effective.
Conclusion
The international community sees narcotics as one of the most dangerous
social evils. International legal acts, as well as national legislations,
including that of the Russian Federation, contain numerous norms regulating
actions against narcotics bound to suppress and prevent it. Moves are made
to perfect and update these norms so that they could counteract new forms
and methods of committing drug-related crimes. Naturally enough, legal
regulations trail after criminal thought in these and other criminal
offenses.
To narrow the gap between the rapid advancement of criminal know-how
and the introduction of the new anti-crime legislation there is a need to
monitor the spread of narcotics, assess it, watch its dynamics, forecast
its progress and carry out appropriate research. Monitoring and research
are to help pinpoint the sensitive spots of drug abuse and work out new
legal norms and methods for dealing with them.
Highly important are the application of legal norms and the planning of
various measures aiming to oppose narcotics.
Private business has been made legal in the new social and economic
conditions. Under the guise of legally established private enterprises
underground drug manufacturing laboratories and drug trade hideouts
(houses, apartments) have begun functioning as unofficial operational
reports confirm. Illegal efforts to produce and sell drugs and the tendency
for their proliferation demand emergency antidrug legislation. Illegally-
operating drug-producing and drug-selling companies present a much bigger
threat to society than all other drug-related ventures do, now that they
(a) spread new varieties of and increasingly more hazardous drugs, (b)
increase, drug production and sales manifold, (c) promote an organized
system of narcobusiness and, consequently, the takeover of drug-trafficking
by organized criminal groups, (d) take monopoly control of drug-trafficking
and reap super-profits in this field, (e) take drug-trafficking operations
beyond the national borders and make use of their foreign connections for
the acquisition, manufacture, transportation, sending, smuggling and sale
of drugs. Their activities prompt many related crimes.
All this calls for moves to update the Russian Criminal Code with
articles on legal responsibility for the production and sale of drugs which
must be considered to belong to the categories of serious and most serious
criminal offenses punishable by ten to fifteen years of imprisonment and
the confiscation of property.
The climatic conditions on the territory of Russian Federation favor
the natural growth and cultivation of drug-bearing plants, which may be, or
are already, used for the purpose of drug production. This calls for the
need to constantly perfect methods of exposing and destroying such plants,
both those that are wild and those that are raised, which, in turn, calls
for a wide range of financial and organizational efforts.
Its geographic and geopolitical position makes the Russian Federation a
convenient trans-shipment point on the road from Asia to other former
Soviet republics and on to Europe. The Russian government, its law-
enforcement agencies, in particular, must, as a result, check illegal
attempts to take drugs across the national border, bolster up its customs
services and see to it that they upgrade their performance and work in
close cooperation with the territorial and traffic police and other
agencies expected to carry out programs of action against narcotics.
The newly gained independence requires that the Russian Federation
confront two problems directly related to narcotics and efforts to overcome
it.
First of all, borders between Russia and other former Soviet republics
show the highest degree of transparency, i.e. border-crossing presents
almost no problem. Given the geographic and geopolitical position of
Russia, the transparency of the national border aggravates the problem of
drug smuggling and calls for the need to essentially fortify the border and
better customs control along it.
Secondly, there is the problem of international relations in the field
of narcotics and international efforts to deal with it. There are two
angles to this second problem. Now that it has gained sovereignty, Russia
has to assume upon itself the functions of establishing and maintaining
international relations, especially since it represents a sort of a link in
the chain that ties drug- producers and drug-consuming regions together.
The second angle of this problem lies in the fact that once being a
part of the Soviet Union, Russian Federation neither faced nor could
possibly face obstacles concerning the jurisdiction of its anti-crime
effort, including crimes committed on territories of different Soviet
republics. Now that they are sovereign nations, the former Soviet republics
have national borders, which, transparent as they are, make legal action
against criminal elements possible only in the context of international
relations and in keeping with international agreements. This, naturally,
complicates the timely launching of operational and investigative actions
aimed at solving criminal cases including those of drug-trafficking.
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