A lack of effort in Southeast Asia on dismantling organised crime gangs is allowing the major players behind much of Australia’s illicit drug trade to operate unchecked, an expert says.
Jeremy Douglas, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, warns drug production and trafficking is so rife the region is at a tipping point, with the vast profits putting governments at risk of being captured by organised crime.
“Arresting truck drivers, seizing the trucks — those are disposable in the eyes of the big organised crime groups, and that’s all we see happening,” Mr Douglas told The Australian.
“We see every year hundreds of truck drivers or fishermen or couriers arrested. But business goes on and it’s growing year on year, to the point where the drug trafficking business is now so big it’s almost at a tipping point.
“It’s spiralling out of control and it’s because of the lack of balance in their approach.”
Mr Douglas said that in Asia, drug investigation issues that would be seen in Australia as basic operational decisions instead required police chief or ministerial authorisation, which was “way too high up”.
