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Friday 5 December 2008

McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers

Our new puppet-masters

Jonathan Sumption on the new book by Misha Glenny

No one pretends that there is a quick fix for something which is so pervasive and mobile and controlled from places so far beyond the reach of western police forces. But the west has contributed mightily to its own problem by its heavy-handed attempts to control the consumption of certain goods by its own citizens, either by banning them (cannabis, amphetamines, cocaine and the various derivatives of heroin) or by imposing heavy taxes on them (cigarettes, alcohol). A tiny market can sometimes be suppressed in this way. But once the use of the offending substances has become widespread and socially acceptable among a significant proportion of the population, the battle is lost.

Crime is a business and, like other commercial activity, it depends on markets. Prohibition creates markets for criminals. As the leading analyst of Russia’s shadow economy (quoted in this book) has observed, prohibition cannot destroy a dynamically developing market. It simply places it under the total control of criminal corporations. The attempt to prevent the consumption of alcohol in the United States between 1919 and 1933 famously led to an upsurge of organised crime without restricting access to alcoholic drinks by anyone who really wanted them. This wholly predictable outcome is being repeated on a larger scale and a wider geographical basis today. The international drug market is a huge consumer market. It is the major generator of organised crime in most western societies. And of petty crime, too, as the drug-users mug, burgle and shoplift to feed their habit at prices far higher than they would pay if they could buy them openly.

As a writer, Misha Glenny has many aggravating ways. He intrudes himself too much (‘As I sat on the sidewalk in Bogotá . . . ’ etc.), a habit which comes of doing too much TV reportage. He seems to admire authoritarian governments, Vladimir Putin’s for example. He blames a surprisingly large number of the world’s ills on capitalism and globalisation. He is short on reflection, and curiously reluctant to draw general conclusions. So far as there is an overarching theme, it is Glenny’s strong, rather puritanical take on western consumerism. In moral terms the criminals get off lightly by comparison. But he has written on an important subject, and his eccentricities are a small price to pay for a book which is informative and eye-opening at every page.

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