Since the Cabinet declared war on drugs in 1993,law enforcement agencies have scored notable successes in cutting down the amount of narcotics smuggled into the island. Interagency cooperation has helped-- but is this a war that can ever be won?
The inhabitants of the dystopia described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World got their daily fix of the drug soma from the government. As Huxley described it, soma was a terrific panacea: "There's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering."
Taiwan's very own dystopia recently turned out to be a village in Taipei county's Wulai township. As in Huxley's world, the village was said to have been "ruled on drugs," but the beneficial effects attributed to soma were entirely lacking as far as the hamlet's 930 residents were concerned. In November last year, investigators found that a large number of them were addicted to amphetamines. After months of investigation, charges were brought against 137 people, accusing them of conspiring to manipulate the villagers through drugs .
Essentially, the ring provided free or cheap amphetamines to the villagers, who became hooked to the point where they would do whatever the ring asked. Some sold their houses and land. A few actually sold their newborn babies. Others sold daughters or nieces as household maids or underage prostitutes. The ring had been operating for about six years, during which time nearly 200 people had, in one way or another, been "sold."
"The victims who got hooked would do anything, no matter how immoral or cruel, to get drugs," says prosecutor Chen Chia-yao (陳佳瑤). Years of investigation have acquainted him all too well with a destructive, dark side of society where drugs are a necessity of life. "You only have to look at the statistics," he says. "In January 1997, 56 percent of Taiwan's prison population had committed narcotics-related crimes." Police observations and statements from prisoners support the assumption that about 20 to 25 percent of all drug abusers run a foul of the law at some point. On that basis, the total number of those illicitly using drugs in Taiwan stands at around 200,000, or approximately 1 percent of the population.
"I'd sensed that drug crimes were on the increase even before the premier declared war on drugs in May 1993," Chen says. That year, 32 percent of arrests made were drug-related, compared to an average of 5 percent during the 1970s and 1980s. A trafficker who smuggled in thirty-eight kilograms of high-grade heroin was also executed in 1993, the first death sentence to be carried out on a narcotics offender in fourteen years. The same year, the US government listed Taiwan as a drug transit center for the first time.
Pressure on the domestic front and from abroad pushed the government to take strong action. The Cabinet set up an integrated task force that included representatives of the Ministry of the Interior's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB), the Ministry of Justice's Investigation Bureau (MJIB), the Nationa l Police Administration (NPA), the Customs Service, and the Coast Guard Command. To prevent operational conflicts and ensure efficiency, all the agencies come under the supervision of the High Court Public Prosecutors' Office, which maintains a computerized database that is available on-line to all concerned agencies. Agents are obliged to report whatever drug-related information they discover to the Prosecutors' Office for inclusion in the database.
So much for the plan; what about the practice? "We're not afraid that the agencies won't try hard enough," says Chen Chia-yao. "The worry is that they may be reluctant to share the information that they've worked so hard to dig up. After all, it may happen only once in a lifetime that a policeman or an investigator gets a really major clue."
But Su Tai-sheng (蘇台生), an MJIB investigator, does not see this as a problem. "We face severe punishment if we don't report everything we get," he notes. "If we make a report and th e case is solved by other agencies using the information we supplied, we get a reward just the same. So I can't see any reason for concealing clues. Besides, prosecutors nowadays don't just sit in their offices and give orders. They take initiatives and go with us to crime scenes; it would be hard to conceal anything from them." Su finds the computer database particularly useful. "Everybody's on a computer somewhere--military records, tax information, or entry and exit records. All these help back up the drug-information database."
Who provides the clues in the first place? Su says that informants are the best source of information. "People hate drugs," he says flatly. "They ruin families. A lot of informers have relatives or children who are drug addicts, so they tip us off. Then people who contribute to cracking drug cases are entitled to a reward. The biggest possible bounty is US$360,000, although no one has qualified for it yet."
The task force has proved highly effective. Since 1993, it has raided and closed thirty-six underground amphetamine factories. Seizures of hydrochloric acid ephedrine, the raw material for making amphetamines, fell sharply from 1,188 kilograms in 1995 to 3.5 kilograms in 1996. At the same time, amphetamine seizures continued to rise, up from 1,437 kilograms in 1995 to 1,906 kilograms in 1996. The figures show that police efforts have rendered Taiwan's amphetamine factories nearly extinct. Taiwan grows none of the plants used in making drugs, such as poppies or coca, so now virtually all narcotics are smuggled into the island rather than produced locally. It follows that the most effective way of preventing narcotics abuse is to keep drugs out.
Chen Chia-yao highlights the policy. "Drug-smuggling is different from gun-smuggling in that drugs are consumed as soon as they hit the shore and find buyers," he says. "Then they disappear, whereas guns stay with the buyer. Therefore, the best way is to keep drugs from e ver reaching the shore, to intercept them at the point of entry."
That is where the Directorate-General of Customs comes in.Jan De-he (詹德和) is the organization's director-general, having worked his way up through the ranks over a period of nearly forty years, and he reckons he has seen just about everything in the way of artful smuggling methods. A tour of the recently-opened customs museum reveals some of what goes on. Photographs and confiscated articles demonstrate how travelers hide drugs in things as diverse as chocolate, cigarette packets, and insoles. Some smugglers dissolve drugs in shampoo, while others tape them to their bodies. Foolhardy criminals even swallow drugs wrapped in substances that they hope will prove non-degradable. "Drugs are profitable, small in size, and easy to hide," Jan says. "No wonder people rack their brains to think of new ways to evade detection."
So, how do customs officers nab smugglers? For undoubtedly they do--in 1996 alone, Taiwan customs seized 532.4 kilograms of illegal narcotics on twenty-seven separate occasions. "In those cases, we mainly had to rely on experience," Jan says. "Some smugglers used children to bring in drugs, because they're low on the list of likely suspects. Some used pregnant women, or people who were visiting Taiwan for the first time and so didn't show up in our records. Some like to go first to Singapore and Malaysia, without passing through customs there, and then transit to Taiwan. Their thinking seems to be that because in Singapore and Malaysia drug-traffickers get the death penalty, we'll be laxer in checking passengers from those places. Well, we're more careful than they think."
Jan De-he admits that checking commercial cargoes is a weak spot for any customs organization. "This is an international problem," he says. "Even US customs is still looking at better ways of examining cargoes. It's frightening when you think of the sheer amount of goods a modern ship or plane carries, and the amount of drugs that can be hidden in the hold. A particular problem for us is Kaohsiung, the world's third-busiest container port. Then again, if a cargo is only passing through Taiwan on its way to other destinations, we can't even check it, according to international practice, unless we first get a tip-off from another state. And that's especially difficult for Taiwan because of our diplomatic isolation."
Jan is referring to the fact that Taiwan is often barred from international organizations. It is not a member of the World Customs Organization, for example. What Jan has to do, therefore, is develop informal personal relationships with fellow customs officers around the world. "We rarely run into a brick wall, because narcotics crime is international," he says. "Customs authorities everywhere have reached a kind of consensus that the war against drugs is one that involves all mankind." But one difficulty that does arise is the frequency with which senior customs officers in other countries change jobs. "The building of rapport depends not on systems, but on people," he points out. "Yet in my seven years as director-general, I've had to deal with seven different customs chiefs in South Korea."
Mainland China has rapidly become Taiwan's principal source of narcotics. In January 1997, 422.39 kilograms of smuggled drugs were seized, 90 percent of them from the mainland. Previously, most heroin smuggled into Taiwan derived from the infamous Golden Triangle (an area where Burma, Thailand, Laos, and mainland China border one another). Narcotics coming out of the Golden Triangle went through Bangkok or Hong Kong before being smuggled into Taiwan. But then investigators in Thailand and Hong Kong beefed up their efforts, so recently drugs from the Golden Triangle and other supply areas tend to be routed through the mainland provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou, which also produce raw material used in the manufacture of narcotics, before reaching Taiwan.
Another problem is that Taiwan appealed to mainland China for bilateral talks with a view to cracking down on drug crimes, but Beijing failed to respond, and at present all cross-strait talks are suspended indefinitely. Some civic organizations, such as the Criminal Investigation and Prevention Association, also went to the mainland to seek avenues of informal cooperation on drug-crime prevention, but to no avail. Bilateral cooperation on drug-crime investigation seems even more remote.
Drug dealers naturally exploit this stalemate. Amphetamine factories, after being slowly squeezed out of Taiwan, moved to mainland China, especially coastal provinces such as Fujian. Taiwan drug manufacturers put up the capital and provided equipment and technology, while the mainland offered cheap raw materials, low-cost labor, and lax police investigation.
Frustrating the actual process of transfer across the Taiwan Strait is fraught with difficulty. Goods produced in mainland China are mostly smuggled into Taiwan on fishing boats. The Seventh Peace Preservation Police Corps of the NPA conducts regular patrols, using fast anti-smuggling craft. But Taiwan's coastline extends for more than 1,400 kilometers, and it is impossible to keep the whole of it under perpetual surveillance. There are also territorial limits to consider. When in pursuit of smugglers the police may venture beyond the island's territorial waters twelve nautical miles from shore--but only as far as twenty nautical miles from the coast.
Yang Tsu-ching (楊子敬) was in charge of the NPA's Seventh Corps from 1994 to 1996, before he became commissioner of the CIB. He was often at sea for days at a time, and has witnessed many offshore deals. "Mainland fishing boats lack proper refrigeration facilities," he says. "So they sell their catch to Taiwan fishermen, who trail them for the purpose. But they often traffic in drugs as well. Some captains hide drugs in oil tanks or conceal them between decks. Others throw packages of drugs overboard to be picked up later. Smugglers will often jettison their cargoes if they think they're in danger of being caught. Rough seas make it difficult to pick the goods up, so it's hard to nail them with the evidence in their possession."
The NPA's Airborne Squadron, equipped since 1993 with seven French AS-365 helicopters, has helped improve this situation, and last year it took delivery of thermal imagers that can take photographs in all weather conditions, which should make the squadron an even more effective weapon in the fight against smuggling.
Early in March this year, the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report published in the United States cited Taiwan for the fourth consecutive year as being a significant drug transshipment center. But the report also had kind words for the island's aggressive law enforcement--a benign judgment that has recently been underpinned by the passage of several drug-crime-related laws, a remarkable achievement for Taiwan's often stalem ated legislature. In December 1996, the Organized Crime Prevention Act came into force. The Money Laundering Control Act, the first of its kind in the region, was implemented in April, and the Secret Witness Protection Act is now on the statute book. All these acts have a single purpose--to strike at the tendency for drug crime to become synonymous with organized crime, involving complex interlocking financial transactions.
One piece of legislation that still awaits enactment is the Drug Prevention and Control Act, which provides for a more comprehensive definition of drugs that will include new types of narcotics and precursor chemicals, and sets out a clearer structure of drug offenses. A heated debate is going on at the Ministry of Justice about whether to adopt the practice of using undercover agents in investigations. Some say that this is an inevitable development for dealing with today's highly organized crime clans. Others maintain that Taiwan is so small that a policeman's identity could never effectively be concealed.
"We abide by agreements set by the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, although Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations," says Su Tai-sheng. "This is just one example of Taiwan abiding by international agreements and regulations, even though it is still treated as an outsider." Certainly, the war against drugs is now global, and Taiwan is doing everything it can to be a faithful--if undervalued--ally in the never-ending but always just war waged against drugs.