The Taliban, that came to power in Afghanistan two years ago, is conducting a dramatic clampdown on poppy cultivation in what until recently had been the world’s leading heroin producer. Since the 1980s, what happens in Afghanistan has had a direct impact on Mauritius.

The Taliban crackdown

In April 2022 the de-facto Taliban government in Kabul announced a crackdown in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, the world’s leading heroin producer. This year, the policy seems to be working. According to a UK-based company Alcis and researchers, the crackdown may lead up to a 90 per cent reduction in the amount of heroin coming out of Afghanistan. An estimate that has been backed up by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). With a major disruption in the global heroin market expected to come out of this, the effect will be felt in Mauritius too, whose drug market has always been affected by what happens in Afghanistan.

Before the 1970s, Afghanistan was already producing opium, limited to smuggling it into Iran, which in 1955 had banned poppy cultivation creating an opportunity for smugglers from neighbouring Afghanistan. However, its rise as a major global heroin exporter did not come until the 1980s. Firstly, there was the 1979 Soviet invasion, which closed off the traditional Iranian market for Afghan drugs while at the same time particularly brutal Soviet tactics such as targeting food crops to starve anti- Soviet Mujahideen groups led increasing numbers of farmers to turn to growing poppy.

At the same time, the 1970s saw the fall of Cambodia and Laos – previously part of the ‘Golden Triangle’ to Communism as well as the eradication of poppy cultivation in Turkey, closing off traditional sources of heroin into European markets. The result was the creation of a vast smuggling network to allow Afghan drugs to fill the vacuum, with the proceeds of heroin being used to help fund the anti-Soviet war. One such route was smuggling heroin through Pakistan, then into China’s Xinjiang and Tibet provinces then down into Nepal where it crossed the relatively open border into India from where it was smuggled through Indian ports into the West.

Heroin comes to Mauritius

In the 1980s, it was this opening to the Indian route that saw heroin finding its way into Mauritius. At the time, Mauritius was itself going through an economic boom that made it an attractive market for Afghan heroin. Starting in 1984 a number of businessmen in Hong Kong came to Mauritius to set up manufacturing units in the free port and the country had signed the Lome III convention. The result was that just between 1984 and 1985, no less than 195 new manufacturing units creating 37,500 jobs were set up in the country.

With more spending power than ever before, Mauritius was a rich market for the flood of heroin that was then making its way out of Afghanistan and entering Mauritius through its harbour, airport and postal services. Incidentally, an aggressive policy of targeting cannabis also created a convenient niche in the local drug market for heroin – initially sold at cheap prices of Rs12-15 a dose to create a domestic market of addicts – to fill.

Initially, it was the Indian route that fed Mauritius’ growing appetite for heroin in the 1980s. And it was not long before it started seriously destabilizing Mauritian politics too. In 1985 a select committee headed by Madun Dulloo proposed harsher measures to deal with the growing drug problem. However, just a week after Dulloo publicized his report, four Mauritian parliamentarians coming from Bombay on diplomatic passports were held up at Schipol airport in Amsterdam after one of their suitcases was found to contain 20 kilos of heroin.

The ‘Amsterdam boys’ affair led directly to the drug commission headed by Sir Maurice Rault. The Rault commission did not just point out that heroin was becoming a big problem, but aside from the Amsterdam boys also pointed to another smuggling network that it dubbed the ‘Bombay Pilgrims’. The resulting political firestorm forced the government’s hand to call elections early in 1987 – rather than 1988 – and created a political culture within Mauritius that continues to this day of accusing opponents of not being hard enough on drugs – or worse – being complicit in the business.

The ‘Smack Track’

The 1990s saw another significant development; with wars tearing the ex-Yugoslavia apart and better policing on Europe’s land frontiers, smugglers soon turned to another alternative route: Africa. Known as the ‘Southern route’ or more informally as the ‘smack track’, heroin from Afghanistan was smuggled into Pakistan from where it was put aboard motorised wooden boats called dhows – each carrying between 100 and 1,000 kilos of heroin – which would anchor in international waters all along the Eastern coast of Africa from Kismayo in Somalia down to Angoche in Mozambique. From there the drugs would be picked up and transported in an elaborate route into Europe. With this new route opening up, heroin coming into Mauritius shifted from coming via India to coming via this new African route.

The opening of the African route and Mauritius’ proximity to it turned what were small-time dealers in the 1980s into part of a much more complex global trade. Mauritius and Seychelles – small, relatively rich countries with limited means to patrol and control their own waters and a corruptible political culture – saw the amount of heroin coming in explode. By the time 1996 rolled around, the Mauritian government’s own estimates suggested that over two per cent of its total population was hooked on heroin, making Mauritius one of the biggest heroin consumers in the world in per capita terms. It still is today.

Failed counter-narcotics

The Taliban’s current crackdown is not unprecedented: back in 2001 it conducted a similar policy of poppy eradication; however it proved to be a brief episode as the Taliban was soon over thrown and replaced by a regime installed by the US. The result turned out to be a disaster for Mauritius.

The ouster of the Taliban, the installation of a weak, corrupt government dominated by warlords and a lack of economic development all combined to see a resurgence of heroin production. Between 2004 and 2009 the US attempted its own poppy eradication programme consisting of a mix of aerial spraying and contractors such as Dyncorp training Afghan officials to manually destroy poppy fields. But that failed. By 2007 Afghanistan was responsible for pumping out 8,200 metric tonnes of opium, enough to satisfy the global demand for heroin on its own.

Downstream, Mauritius was feeling the pain of the ineffectiveness of this policy. With the amount of heroin making its way out of Afghanistan growing and supercharging the amount of narcotics travelling on the African southern route and therefore into Mauritius too, Port Louis soon discovered that the flood of heroin was also spinning into its own HIV-AIDs crisis. Though the disease was first discovered in 1987, by the early 2000s most of the growth of HIV-AIDs infections was registered amongst heroin users. In 2005, more than 90 per cent of all new infections were popping up among heroin addicts sharing and re-using needles. This forced Port Louis to turn to the UNODC to come up with a needle exchange programme and a methadone substitution programme in 2006. Both programmes are still in place.

Faced with growing anger among Afghan farmers dependent on poppy growing and corrupt Afghan officials making money off poppy themselves, Washington D.C scaled back its counter-narcotics programme in 2012 judging the programme not only as a failure, but politically undermining its occupation of the country to boot. Predictably, by 2013 poppy cultivation had spread out to over 200,000 hectares in Afghanistan – the highest it had ever been. A UN survey estimated that by 2017 that amount of land being used to grow poppy had grown to over 328,000 hectares. In 2001, it was just 7, 606 hectares.

By this time, whatever counter-narcotics operations were being undertaken by the US in Afghanistan were exclusively targeting heroin labs linked to the Taliban insurgency. This included air strikes under the Trump administration. This re-focus came after the UNODC was privately warning that the Taliban had become a major player in the global heroin trade and controlled enough stocks to manipulate global heroin prices to better fund their insurgency. At the time it was estimated that opium was bringing in between $1.5 billion to $3 billion into Afghanistan annually. Between 2002 and 2017 the US had spent approximately $8.62 billion in counter-narcotics but had only succeeded in turning Afghanistan into the supplier of 85 per cent of the world’s heroin by 2020.

The failure and scaling back of counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan had a big impact on Mauritius. With the UN pointing out that the amount of heroin coming onto the southern route “appeared to be increasing”, Mauritius consequently saw a surge in the volumes of heroin ending up in its own streets. Between 2017 and 2021, Mauritian authorities had seized 278.6 kilos of heroin (which made by the largest chunk of drug seizures) and recorded an increasing number of dr ug cases linked to heroin. In 2011 for example, out of the 3,720 drug-related cases, 12 per cent involved heroin. By 2022, heroin made up 30 per cent of the 4,502 cases reported that year. This influx of heroin from Afghanistan, making its way into Africa and then into Mauritius rendered its methadone programme – designed to mitigate its heroin problem – effectively useless.

What next

Given its recent experience, any news of a robust crackdown on heroin out of Afghanistan should be welcome news in Mauritius. Unlike the earlier 2001 crackdown, the current one being carried out by the Taliban is different in scale. The opium economy was much larger now – 223,000 hectares in 2022 versus 82,000 hectares in 2000 – and the current campaign also targets trade and processing into heroin, not just eradicating poppy fields.

Within Mauritius it might take some time for the effects of this campaign to be felt; back in 2000-2001 it took European states 18 months to see a heroin shortage lead to skyrocketing prices; and Mauritius too might have to wait while heroin stocks out of the 2022 crop burnout to see the global shortage of heroin come out of Afghanistan play out on its domestic drug market. Should the crackdown in Afghanistan continue, it would effectively plunge the Mauritian drug market into an unprecedented situation; since the 1980s all the heroin coming into the country has been from Afghanistan. This did not change, merely the routes and volumes coming in. But with Afghanistan – that has until recently dominated the global heroin market – in 2022 Afghanistan produced 6,200 metric tonnes of heroin compared to its nearest rival Myanmar at 795 tonnes – moving out of the heroin business entirely and drying up supply along the African route, this would be a new situation for Mauritius leading to the realistic possibility of finally seeing its heroin problem that it has unsuccessfully grappled with for decades, getting resolved.

For Mauritius this would mean a dramatic re-structuring of its drug industry. This, at least, is what history indicates. When the Taliban first cracked down on heroin in 2001, the resulting heroin shortage led to the emergence of synthetics in European markets primarily supplied from labs in China. When Europe moved to combat this new problem in 2008 by tightening its laws, manufacturers moved to export synthetic drugs into states where the laws concerning synthetics were either weak or non-existent. The 2018 Drug Commission report called it “dumping”. It was only in 2013 when two cases were found that Mauritius realized that it too was facing a wave of synthetics, starting with chemical components ordered online from China and, more recently, from India. That forced Mauritius to amend its Dangerous Drugs Act in 2013 to include synthetic cannabinoids as an illegal drug and then again in 2019 to include chemicals used in the manufacture of synthetics.

Thus far, the synthetic problem is mostly concentrated among the young, with synthetics seen as a cheaper alternative to the much less dangerous, but much more expensive, recreational use of cannabis. One result of the drying up of heroin out of Afghanistan could be the spread of the use of synthetic drugs amongst older heroin users too, just as heroin addicts in Europe – particularly in the Baltic states – reacted to the slowdown in heroin supply in the early 2000s by turning to synthetics such as fentanyl.

This possibility is raised by a 2020 report by the UNODC which pointed to a rise in the use of Tramadol in half of all African states between 2015 and 2019 and rising methamphetamine seizures in West and Southern Africa produced in African labs to be smuggled into Asia, Australia and Europe, and the manufacture of ecstasy for the first time in South Africa in 2018. These synthetics would replace heroin in many of these markets. With heroin coming from Afghanistan drying up and so state in a position to fill the vacuum left behind, the existing southern route used to smuggle heroin might now be used to smuggle synthetics made in Africa.

For Mauritius while the news out of Afghanistan is good so far as heroin is concerned, it will have to be worried that the resulting vacuum left behind by a shrinking heroin supply is filled by a growing synthetics problem.