Right here is the best shit you can get in Tonga.
You could melt this down,
get a syringe, and mainline this bitch.
When you think of Fiji, Tonga, and the Pacific Islands,
you tend to think of tropical beaches and lush rainforests,
not bricks of cocaine and meth being cooked with rat poison.
But there’s a new Pacific drug superhighway
emerging across the South Pacific Islands
with unforeseen and devastating consequences.
The search for more hard drugs in the maritime islands
will continue next week.
To date, 89 bars of cocaine have been discovered
on separate occasions.
However, there has been no breakthrough
as to whom it belongs to.
This is how the war on drugs is bringing addiction, violence,
and corruption to so-called paradise.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[PACIFIC NARCO SUPERHIGHWAY]
The story of the Pacific Islands narco explosion
really begins in Australia.
The market for cocaine is extremely lucrative in Australia.
It has one of the highest rates of per capita consumption of cocaine
in the world.
And Australians pay one of the highest costs per gram for cocaine.
Cartels in Latin America
are shipping the cocaine across the Pacific Ocean
and through little Pacific Island countries like Fiji,
who get caught up in this drug-trafficking highway.
Australia is about 8,000 miles from South America
and has some of the fiercest customs enforcement in the world.
Drugs are notoriously difficult to smuggle into the country.
This is the Sydney International mail gateway facility.
It is the biggest gateway facility in Australia,
and over 70 percent of the mail coming into Australia
is processed right here.
It equates to roughly about 50 detections a day of narcotics.
Just before Christmas, we actually had over 120 kilos
within a week period.
Well, I guess everyone was getting ready for New Year’s.
Well, not while we were involved
because obviously we stopped that happening.
Of course, that doesn’t make people in Australia
want those drugs any less,
but it does drive their price way up.
A gram of cocaine in Colombia,
its street value is about $8.
By the time it reaches Sydney,
a gram of cocaine will sell for about US$200
so it's a massive markup.
These high prices make the Australian drugs market
very attractive to international cartels
and organized crime networks.
We know what drugs come from what country.
You know, Asia, you get your meth, your ephedrine.
A lot of prescription medication from India.
Europe, you get a lot of steroids, you get coke,
a lot of MDMA.
South America, North America, Canada, the majority is coke...
with a bit of meth here and there.
And this is where the Pacific Islands like Fiji and Tonga come in.
These islands are an ideal stop-off point
for international crime groups smuggling drugs from Central America
to Australia and New Zealand.
One popular technique to evade detection
is to drop the drugs in underwater caches attached to GPS trackers,
which are then picked up by other ships
en route to their final destination.
That’s how bricks of cocaine and meth
end up getting washed up on Fijian beaches.
I come across from this way, and I see one package.
I saw on the side of the box there was a picture of a buffalo.
But criminal networks are nothing if not innovative.
Many groups have now realized that
instead of trying to import methamphetamine across the Atlantic,
they can simply cook it up in the Pacific Islands themselves.
Equipments that police have confiscated over time showed that
there is a source producing illicit drugs within the country.
In 2004, there was a massive bust, a meth lab in Fiji.
That really shocked people
because it was the first meth lab bust in the Pacific.
And it really shocked people into thinking,
“Oh, this might be the beginning of local usage and a big concern.”
The movement of precursors coming in in various forms
is still very much a possibility.
But in an illegal market,
those precursor agents are often difficult to come by,
especially when you’re on a small island
thousands of miles from the nearest big chemicals factory.
Tests are now showing that samples of meth
originating in the Pacific Islands have been created with
whatever chemicals local crime groups could get their hands on,
including new psychoactive substances,
sedatives, stimulants,
and even traces of mosquito spray and rat poison.
We found a mixture, a concoction of methamphetamine and cocaine,
even to the extent of rat bait being one of the ingredients
that’s utilized in this.
And it's not just meth.
While smoking weed on these islands goes back a long way,
seizures show that industrial-level cultivation is ramping up.
Police have been fighting this with the usual war on drugs tactics:
pulling up vast areas of cannabis plants
and hoping that the problem goes away.
But unsurprisingly, it never does.
The Fiji Police Force has identified another new drug hotspot.
This follows the uprooting of over 1,000 plants believed to be marijuana
in Tailevu last week.
Fiji is so fertile.
It does seem like a key part of the drugs policy
is just going around uprooting cannabis plants constantly
that keep cropping up.
For many years, there was no issue
with what law enforcement in the Pacific call “white drugs.”
What happened is,
as the trafficking of cocaine and meth came through the Pacific,
those drugs would be offloaded into the region
as sort of payment for the local people
who are involved in the trafficking.
What began as an export market
is now spilling over into vastly increased local drug use
and the organized crime that goes along with it.
You can get ice as easy as getting weed
out on the streets.
When did it become so available?
About two years ago.
Meth, or ice, as it’s commonly known,
is being used to stay awake by cab drivers
and workers on long shifts,
as well as a party drug and increasingly by sex workers.
The use of drugs is becoming more prevalent in prostitution,
as sex workers use them to overcome fears.
At times, high-end clients
are the ones who introduce hard drugs to young sex workers.
The most common drugs used by sex workers are inhalants
and methamphetamine.
In 2009, there were only 148 drug-related policing cases in Fiji.
But by 2018, this had gone up to 1,400 arrests.
Meth cases rose from two in 2009
to 113 in 2019.
And islands like Tonga are experiencing similar problems.
So in this cup right here,
I have about half an ounce of meth.
On a Sunday, I’ll sell to about
close to 200 people.
From five until midnight, easy five grand.
That’s a fucking easy five grand.
Organized crime gangs have expanded rapidly over the pandemic,
taking advantage of people who’ve been left without work.
International criminal syndicates on the Pacific
might be even stronger in light of COVID
because of the massive economic downturn
that COVID represented for the Pacific.
And so there is a real fear that actually
there is this much more fragile
and destabilized economic situation in these countries
that make it easier for transnational criminal syndicates
to sort of get their footholding.
Another factor driving the rise in Pacific Island drug smuggling and use
is the “tough on drugs” policies put in place by Australia
and New Zealand themselves.
Both those countries have instituted policies where
Pacific Islanders convicted of crimes
are sent back to their home countries.
Fucking shot him four times in the stomach.
And that's where it all began.
Got arrested.
Since I was a juvenile, they tried to give me life,
but I ended up going off with four years.
By that time, they were telling me I was getting deported.
Many of the deportees have no connection to these islands anymore
and little access to government support.
What they do have is criminal know-how
and international connections
in the Australian and New Zealand drug markets.
I don’t feel guilty about dealing drugs.
Not at all.
If you’re in love with drugs, I’m your best friend.
In Fiji, there is nowhere to go, really.
There’s no rehabilitation center.
There's not even a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the country.
There’s no methadone clinic.
There’s just-- There’s nothing.
Another key component, Mr. Speaker, is the rehabilitation
because right now, St Giles Hospital is not meant for that purpose.
And I think that’s one of the injustices of this whole issue,
is that now it’s this huge local-grown problem
that affects communities that don’t have the resources to deal with it.
And they’re starting from scratch to deal with the problem
they really didn’t have to deal with ten, 20 years ago,
but now it's very, very serious.
So while the drugs continue to flow on the Pacific narco superhighway,
Australians pay over the odds for a gram of coke,
and Asian and Latin American criminal groups reap huge profits,
it’s the people of Fiji, Tonga, and the Pacific Islands
who are becoming the newest victims of the war on drugs.
We’d like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs.