By IPS Correspondents
MADRID, Jun 27 2000 (IPS)

A joint Spanish, Portuguese and United States drug enforcement operation led to the arrest of 21 members of an international drug trafficking ring in northern Spain Monday, on the International Day Against Drug Abuse.

Spain’s Guardia Civil, with the support of the Portuguese police and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), arrested two Portuguese nationals, four Colombians, six Spaniards and 11 citizens of Cape Verde — islands off of west Africa, which previously belonged to Portugal — in the northern province of Pontevedra.

In addition, they seized 2,500 kgs of cocaine.

Besides the spectacular anti-drug sting, International Day Against Drug Abuse was marked in Spain by events focusing on prevention, admist a broad national debate on the problem of drugs.

An awareness-raising campaign was launched by the Spanish Red Cross Monday, to promote positive uses of spare time. This is the first time that the campaign, financed by the National Plan on Drugs, is being run by a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

The concerns of local authorities are well-founded, with surveys and statistics showing that consumption of legal and illegal drugs is on the rise among youth in Spain, where it is already higher than the European average. A two-year study commissioned by the National Plan on Drugs highlighted that disturbing fact.

According to the study, 10 percent of minors have tried cocaine, and 6.6 percent consume it frequently.

Meanwhile, just 55.3 percent of people aged 15 to 29 said they had never tried cocaine, compared to a European average of 71.6 percent.

Police reported Monday that a 14-year-old died Saturday after taking a Japanese synthetic drug known locally as ‘Mitsubishi’, in Pineda del Mar, a town located on Spain’s northern Mediterranean coast.

According to sociologist Teresa Laespada, with the Santa Maria Foundation, today’s youth begin to take drugs in an attempt to break with routine, rather than due to problems or political or ideological differences with their parents.

Alain Vallon, with the European Observatory on Drugs, warned that mixing substances, like alcohol and the synthetic drug ecstasy, is common and especially dangerous.

Long nights of bar-hopping fuel drug consumption, drinking and smoking. While in the rest of Europe only 11 percent of young people go to four or five bars, pubs or discotheques in the same night, that proportion stands at 36 percent in Spain.

That situation is aggravated by the location of Spain, known as Europe’s “aircraft carrier of drugs”, warns the Geopolitical Observatory on Drugs, an independent French organisation that puts out periodic reports on the evolution of drug trafficking in the world.

Gibraltar, a territory under British jurisdiction, to which Spain lays claim, is an important money laundering centre, adds the Observatory.

Fifteen percent of the 60,000 tax-exempt companies operating in that territory located on the Straits of Gibraltar are dedicated to laundering drug money, according to the Spanish government.

In Spain, the heaviest flows of smuggling have been detected in Catalonia, Valencia and Andalucia, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, and in the Basque country and Galicia — where Pontevedra is located — in northern Spain.

NGOs involved in fighting drug abuse and providing assistance to addicts and Spain’s national and regional governments agree on the need to differentiate between addicts, who must be seen as victims, small-time drug dealers, many of whom are themselves addicts, and organised criminal rings, which are generally international in character.

A survey carried out by Spain’s Foundation to Help Against Drug Addiction in May found that 58 percent of respondents believed that drug addicts convicted of criminal charges should not be sent to prison, but to treatment centres instead.

That same month, a court in Madrid handed down the lightest possible sentence to a Colombian who swallowed nearly 200 balls of cocaine wrapped in plastic in an attempt to smuggle the drug into Spain.

The court decision stated that “those who come with the drugs in their intestines are never the powerful, but the social and economically weakest.” The verdict took into account the fact that the convicted Colombian needed money to pay for a serious operation for his 14-year-old daughter as an “extraordinary extenuating circumstance.”

Comprehension and prevention both form part of the policy shared by authorities and NGOs. In the midst of a heated debate early this year, the government of the autonomous region of Madrid installed “narcosalas” (narco-rooms) where addicts can take their fix in safe, hygienic conditions.

Gonzalo Robles, a delegate of the National Plan on Drugs, said “we are all potential addicts,” and for that reason “our greatest efforts must go towards prevention.

“Providing attention to drug addicts is a social conquest that forms part of the welfare state….we are all part of the problem and part of the solution,” he underlined.

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