“Is this real??”, one commenter demands to know. Another watches the butter being smeared onto his brown bread and suggests: “This is what it feels like to die.”

Videos of “Keith” leaning over his chopping board are posted by his wife—who is from North East China—almost every day. Some days, he’s making avocado toast. Others, it’s smoked salmon or scrambled eggs on toast. The meals have become known as “Dry Lunch,” and are sparking a wave of outrage, confusion, and morbid curiosity in China, with hundreds of thousands of people making staple Western bread-based dishes and posting them online, to a response that is equal parts opprobrium and disbelief.

According to Yaling Jiang, a Chinese journalist living in the UK, there are two key elements of a dry lunch: The temperature—cold—and the presence of some kind of bread. Beyond that, the parameters are pretty loose. “Anything can be a dry lunch, as long as it’s in an open-sandwich form, looks healthy-ish, and is seemingly unappetising,” he says. Dry lunch, Jiang explains, is less defined by what it is than what it isn’t—namely “anything that’s either nourishing or tastes good.”

It’s not the first time millions of Chinese people have spent time pointing and laughing at the meals eaten in the West. In June last year, “báirén fàn” (AKA “white people food”) started trending among Chinese workers—who flooded social media with cold, spiceless dishes as a form of self inflicted suffering. “The spirit of ‘white people food’ is that it’s supposed to be NOT enjoyable,” one TikTok user explained. “The point of the white people’s meal is to learn what it feels like to be dead, but I’ve taken two bites and it was so bad it made me realize how alive I am,” another user wrote on Weibo.

But after initial shock comes acceptance. An article on Chinese social media platform 36Kr explains the concept of sandwiches thus: “After watching a short video, viewers have changed from questioning the dry old man, understanding the dry old man, to becoming a dry old man. The old man is us, and the dry lunch is our dry life.” The article presents a series of sandwich-related stats about the UK, alongside screenshots from British films and TV shows—Paddington Bear, Downton Abbey, Harry Potter—presented as sandwich-eating evidence.

In case Chinese readers thought this was a joke, there are several disclaimers confirming that it’s not.

The phenomenon is starting to reach beyond the online world, too. In Chinese supermarkets like Hema stores—a grocery store with branches all over China—there are now “dry shopping areas,” offering items like bread and baguettes for people to make dry lunches in the safety of their own home. According to Jiang, many cafes are also “adopting the phrase to sell their European-style breads and sandwiches.”

Part of the dry lunch’s allure is the sheer simplicity and ease of putting a filling between bread. The reception seems to have moved from a confusion to a genuine desire to understand the cultural differences in the way Western people eat. “A lot of people in China feel that ‘white people food’ are meals only for survival but not at all for pleasure,” explains Shisong Liu, a teacher from China’s Fujian province.

“Despite the sarcasm, people also realize that it is much more convenient as a packed lunch, so it has become trendy for some people to copy the [dry lunch] recipes for work,” he says. “Given this background, the videos of ‘English dry lunch’ provide a vivid perspective for people to understand the authentic, everyday life of ordinary people in the UK.” In some ways, there’s something beautiful about sandwiches becoming a symbol of gritty English life, like grime music or the film Scum.

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The algorithms of social media platforms thrive on content that is so shocking it skims the threshold of believability. The concept of sandwiches—in China at least—hits that brief: “For us, the 干巴 lunch is just too simple, even pitiful,” explains Dylan, a teacher from Shanghai. “We think there should be much more to a meal than just bread and one or two things on top. A lot of people really don’t believe that the man in the video could be representative of how people in the UK or Europe eat.”

All the proof Dylan needed arrived in the closing moments of the most recent UK election campaign, when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made one last, desperate attempt to appeal to the British public—by claiming his favorite food was “generally sandwiches.” The ploy didn’t work, and Sunak’s tenure already feels like a distant memory. Happily this hasn’t had a toxifying effect on the popularity of “Uncle Keith”—as he’s become known online—who continues to stand in his kitchen in a plaid shirt, quietly slicing into pieces of bread, captivating audiences in China with his dry, dry lunch.

Credit to Ryan Gray for translation assistance.

The post “White People Food” Is Trending in China, Thanks to This Guy appeared first on VICE.

The Nazi Eagle symbol was developed by Hitler’s party in the 1920s, and is also known as the Imperial Eagle or Parteiadler. As well as the tablets bearing its image, cops seized half a kilo of weed and 100 grams of coke. The arrest was only reported by an Irish tabloid newspaper, the Sunday World, but the Dutch police confirmed its accuracy to VICE.

The irony is inescapable: to see an ecstasy pill (a drug synonymous with feelings of love, euphoria, and empathy) juxtaposed with Nazi insignia (synonymous with hate, brutal intolerance, and genocide, if you hadn’t been paying attention) is jarring in the extreme.

Yet this isn’t an isolated incident. “Yesterday, a member of the French Psychedelic Society, who works in a harm reduction association in western France, sent us this,” Dr Zoë Dubus, a post-doctoral researcher specialising in psychotropic drugs, wrote on X this week. Attached to the post was a photo of two grey pills, also stamped with the Nazi Eagle.

According to Dr Dubus, the pills are “starting to circulate in France” and have “been spotted since early 2024 in Switzerland, Iceland, and Holland.” Testing in Zurich revealed this design has also been used to make 2C-B (in 2023) and MDMA (this year).

The trend exists in an interesting context. Far-right political parties have made massive gains in Brussels of late, a situation lubricated by a grim uptick in youth support. In Germany, 16 percent of under-25s voted for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the EU elections earlier this month, triple the number for the same election in 2019. The National Rally (RN) in France was the most popular party for people aged below 34, increasing ten points to 32 percent of the vote for that demographic. Meanwhile, Poland’s far-right Confederation party saw an 18.5 percent increase in support from voters under 30. Similar shit has gone down in Portugal, Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands.

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Is it possible that we’re seeing Europe’s far-right surge play out through the medium of party drug designs? The first sample spotted with a Nazi symbol was in Switzerland in 2019, followed a few years later by a swastika LSD tablet. But until now, Dr Dubus explains, it’s been a “limited phenomenon.” That’s changed this year, however.

“In early 2024, several tablets with the Nazi eagle and swastika were analysed, indicating an increase in production,” she recalls. “What’s more, the pills are all different in quality and composition: 2C-B, MDMA, and a strange mixture which seems to indicate that one of the batches was made by a very amateur chemist.” The chemical diversity with the same pill design, she argues, demonstrates that they come from several different manufacturers. She does not know which groups are making them at the moment, but notes that European MDMA production continues to be mainly focused around the Netherlands.

The far-rightification of Europe’s illicit drug supply isn’t exclusive to ecstasy and 2C-B; it appears to have extended to the coke supply, too. Last year, narcs at a port in northern Peru busted 58 kilos of coke destined for Belgium. Each individual kilo block that made up the haul was wrapped in Nazi regalia and—just in case you missed that glaring swastika-shaped clue—the bricks of gear themselves were stamped with the telltale word ‘HITLER’.

Police Colonel Luis Bolanos told reporters the Nazi coke was worth $3 million and would’ve been “distributed across Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Spain.” Again, it’s hard to know if the special design had been ordered by neo-Nazi drugs gangs, or drugs gangs looking to sell to neo-Nazis, but if there’s one thing worse than being trapped with a neo-Nazi, it’s probably being trapped with a neo-Nazi who’s high on cocaine.

There’s an increasing stockpile of anecdotal evidence of Europe’s Nazi drug surge. Four months ago, a Redditor who self-describes as “a casual stoner” was baffled when presented with drugs branded with Nazi iconography. “A friend of mine showed me a bag of MDMA pills shaped like Nazi Eagles,” he wrote. “He found them funny as hell in an ironic way.” He added: “I kinda forgot about it, but now I’m seeing more and more people posting and having ecstasy shaped as swastikas, SS logos or Nazi Eagles, none of them are white supremacists … seeing how prevalent this has become lately, I’m kinda confused, is there any reason for it?”

I reached out to the Redditor and the subreddit requesting more information. The original poster has yet to reply, but in typical nihilistic fashion, those who did don’t link the design to genuine far-right groups. One said “people just press ‘em into whatever they want for the fun of it,” some said it was done for “marketing” purposes, and a couple believed it was a reference to the fact the original Nazis were themselves tweakers, often meth-ed up to the eyeballs for days on end while conducting their barbaric rampage across Europe.

But others were less optimistic. “I think the use of SS insignia and the Parteiadler as a pressed pill design speaks for itself,” Dr Brian Pace, an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, told VICE. “Attempts to dismiss or excuse it as some kind of troll is to concede that one can troll in this way without some level of adherence to far-right ideologies. The only people who would find that funny are fascists, period.”

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I asked Dr Dubus if she thinks that the people pressing the pills are trolls or actual far-right groups. “Some could be trolls. But some could really be linked to Nazi groups that very openly discuss their use of psychedelics on forums.

“Ecstasy pills have always been used to spread ideas,” she added. “Counterexamples are the Me Too or Antifa pills. But the increase in the presence of this symbol at several French parties [raves] in recent days, just after the elections giving 30 percent to the worst far-right party in history, is particularly worrying.”

Follow Simon on Twitter @oldspeak1

The post Nazi Drugs Are Sweeping Across Europe appeared first on VICE.

The haul, valued at $1.1 billion by officials, was found on Sunday at a pig farm in the province of Los Rios.

The drugs were found alongside a weapons cache and were packaged in bricks labelled with airlines such as Etihad, BA, Lufthansa and KLM. 

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The discovery, on top of an estimated 14 tons of cocaine already seized from gangs this month, represents a big win for President Daniel Noboa’s war against organised crime in his country – which blew up earlier this month when convicted gang leader ‘Fito’ escaped prison and the authorities declared a national state of emergency. 

“It is presumed that this material could have been transported to the markets of Asia, Europe and North and Central America,” the Ecuadorian army said in a post on X. “This operation represents a strong weakening of the operational, logistical and financial capacity of drug trafficking worldwide.”

Ecuador has seen a massive increase in crime and violence over the past five years as international cocaine trafficking gangs started using its ports, in particular its largest, Guayaquil, as transit points for shipments between Colombia and Europe.  

The post Record $1.1 Billion Cocaine Stash Found By Army in Ecuador appeared first on VICE.

Four bronze belt ends depicting a snake devouring a frog—thought to be a symbol of creation and/or fertility—were recently discovered in Moravia, Bohemia, Bavaria, and Hungary. Because of their near-identical shape and make, archaeologists now believe that these belt ends are evidence of an unknown pagan cult with far-reaching and diverse populations across Europe in the early Middle Ages.

“When the belt with the motif of a snake devouring a frog was discovered with the help of metal detectors at the site near Břeclav in southern Moravia, we thought it was a rare find with a unique decoration,” said lead researcher Jiří Macháček in a news release. 

“However, we later found that other nearly identical artifacts were also unearthed in Germany, Hungary and Bohemia. I realized that we were looking at a previously unknown pagan cult that linked different regions of central Europe,” the head of the Department of Archaeology and Museology at the Masaryk University Faculty of Arts said.

Macháček’s team conducted a thorough series of analyses to learn more about the buckles and their provenance, which they reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science. 

Their work involved making high-tech scans and conducting a lead isotope analysis of the buckles to determine their composition, as well as three-dimensional scans to see how closely-related the four buckles really were to one another.

According to the analysis, not only were most of the buckles made from the same wax cast, but the copper used to make them came from the same metal ore in the Slovak Ore Mountains—one of the main suppliers for this material in Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries. The 3D models suggest that the buckles came from the same workshop. 

Because of how widespread and similar the fittings are, the authors believe the belts were a way to communicate between classes and peoples. This theory upends a previously-held idea that this style of belt was only used by elites  within the Avar ethnic group—a powerful group of people who conquered southeast central Europe in the sixth century and whose empire lasted some 200 years. 

Iconographic analysis of the snake-eating-a-frog motif also revealed that its symbols are ones that show up in various artifacts across cultures in Europe at the time. For example, the snake appears on Avar artifacts symbolizing creation and in Slavic mythology to mean coming from the earth. The frog, on the other hand, could represent a Slavic deity of fertility or a woman who has just given birth. “It was a universally comprehensible and important ideogram” said Macháček.

Taken together, the study’s authors believe the belt buckles were worn by members of a pagan cult, with members spread across Europe through the sixth to eighth centuries. “Today, we can only speculate about its exact meaning, but in the early Middle Ages, it connected the diverse peoples living in Central Europe on a spiritual level,” said Macháček.

The post Archaeologists Keep Finding Evidence of a Mysterious Ancient Cult In Europe appeared first on VICE.

I’m in utter disbelief, staring down at a positive result on a drugstore pregnancy test. It’s March 2020. My relationship had just ended two days before, I’d just found out my roommate and I would be evicted and, thanks to a massive bout of procrastination, I had about a month left to finish my bachelor’s thesis. 

Getting pregnant was the last of a long list of life-changing events I hadn’t seen coming. My roommate, however, had. I’d been tired for weeks, the only food I craved was mango – which I inevitably threw up after eating – and I felt ambivalent about absolutely everything. “I think you should probably take a test,” she said.

I live in the Netherlands, one of the countries with some of the most progressive abortion laws in the world. Abortions are available on request up to 21 weeks from the day of conception and up to 24 weeks in cases where the mother’s health is at risk. According to the 2021 European Abortion Policies Atlas, this legislation is among the most permissive in the EU where most countries (13 out of 27 members, including Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy and Ireland) limit abortions to 12 weeks from the day of your last menstruation. That basically means you only have two months to find out you’re pregnant and make a decision after you miss your first period.

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Another seven countries, including Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and Spain, allow abortions up to between 12 and 18 weeks, while in Poland and Malta abortions are pretty much illegal. Just outside of EU boundaries, only Sweden, the UK and Iceland have comparatively permissive abortion laws, allowing the procedure up to 24 weeks. 

The Netherlands loses a few points in the Atlas ranking because you have to wait for a mandatory five-day reflection period before you can access abortion care. Eight other member states, including Italy, Germany, Belgium and Spain, also have mandatory waiting periods. But at least abortions are completely covered by the Dutch healthcare system, something that is true for only 15 out of the 27 EU countries. 

In 2019, around 32,200 abortions were performed in the Netherlands, corresponding to about ninne out of 1,000 people aged 15 to 44. That’s well below the international average of 39 per 1,000, which is likely to be an underestimate given how underreported abortions are, especially in places where they’re illegal.

I find this fact fascinating because anti-abortion advocates often say that making abortion care easily accessible will result in more people terminating their pregnancy. That’s not corroborated by the facts: Abortion rates have fallen and plateaued in the Netherlands since the 90s. A country’s abortion rate is strongly linked to women’s socioeconomic status and sex education. As stated in a 2020 UN report about abortion laws, “restricting legal access to abortion does not decrease the need for abortion, but it is likely to increase the number of women seeking illegal and unsafe abortions.”

Another country place once thought to have progressive abortion legislation was the US, at least before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Although this is currently being challenged in the courts, states like Texas have banned abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy. Remember: If you’re six weeks along, your periods might have only dried up for about two weeks – something that can happen if you’re stressed or hormonally imbalanced. I was six weeks pregnant when I found out. If I lived in Texas, I could have been forced to have the baby. 

I think about that all the time. People are most likely to get an abortion between the ages of 18 and 29. At 25, I was a textbook case. But even though I had the law and the healthcare system behind me, this decision wasn’t easy to make.

Quite the opposite. I’ve always been clearly pro-choice. But when I got pregnant, I didn’t know which decision was right for me. I had always wanted to be a mother, but only at a time when my life was stable. And even though my circumstances were incompatible with having a kid, I was still riddled with doubt. 

Before going through with this, I wanted to talk things through with someone, but I couldn’t think of anyone who had gone through the same experience, even though the people around me are quite open-minded. According to a 2020 study conducted by the consulting firm Ipsos and the NGO Humanistisch Verbond, 69 percent of people in the Netherlands have hardly ever spoken about abortion with anyone in their lives. Interestingly, 85 percent of respondents also said discussions on the topic should be more open. 

Three days after I found out I was pregnant, the Netherlands entered an “intelligent lockdown”, introducing a series of restrictive measures to contain the pandemic. Nobody knew much about COVID-19 at that point, and I was told that if I felt even the slightest bit under the weather, I wouldn’t be allowed to go to the abortion clinic or even see my GP. Despite the country’s state of emergency, my doctor couldn’t mail me the abortion pill either. I had to quarantine for two weeks in my tiny room and hope I wouldn’t develop or display any COVID-19 symptoms, otherwise my abortion would have been further delayed. 

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With each passing day, the decision became more difficult. I yearned for a hug, but was too afraid to touch my roommates. Getting too close to people meant I risked jeopardizing my appointment. I was consumed by fears I’d have to move back with my parents and raise a child. I kept struggling with feelings of guilt and shame, but couldn’t open up about them to friends, because I felt I couldn’t just drop the news on them over the phone.

Eventually, I managed to get my pregnancy terminated and started putting the pieces of my life back together. But I still craved a frank conversation to try to make sense of what I’d just been through. So I decided to meet with Eva de Goeij, 30, the founder of the Abortion Buddies programme, which matches people seeking an abortion with volunteers who accompany them to the clinic and protect them from anti-abortion activists.

“I had thought my decision through and kept a brave face while I was at the clinic, but I also felt so ashamed. I cried so much during that time,” de Goeij told me over coffee. I, too, felt like I had to project I was brave and resilient. When I woke up after the procedure, still a little bit high, I assured the doctors I could easily walk to my own bed. Recovery takes a few hours, but I asked to go home after 15 minutes to work on my thesis.

Once I stepped outside, I decided to walk all the way to my place because I didn’t want to burden anybody. All I wanted was not to make a big deal out of this. And yet, my body was telling me I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be. In the weeks leading up to the appointment, I felt constantly tired and overcome by emotion.

“Interviews we’ve done for our research show that the pregnancy was super fuzzy for many people,” de Goeij said, “as if their heads were submerged in fog.”

Feeling insecure, blaming yourself for everything and panicking for no reason – I chalked it all up to my own shortcomings. But in fact, the hormones in my blood and the constant state of stress had a huge impact on that, too. I struggled for a while, even after the procedure. If I had known you can experience depression after an abortion or miscarriage, I would have been able to understand my own feelings a lot better.

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Another thing de Goeij and I had in common was how our perception of our own bodies shifted. Suddenly, I found my body to be absolutely beautiful, despite carrying a bunch of extra weight. My breasts were fuller and I was charmed by the little bump of my belly. “I can relate to that,” de Goeji said. “It was a confusing feeling, I was both ashamed and proud. I felt super feminine and thought, ‘Look at me, this is what I’m capable of’.”

In my case, the signs of the pregnancy are still visible on my body. In the beginning, I found it difficult to look in the mirror, because I’d be confronted with the fact that I was no longer carrying a baby, nor had I birthed one. Now I can say that I have never been so confident in my body. When I look at it, I think of all the amazing things it can do.

As de Goeij said, borrowing from Dutch philosopher Trudy Dehue, our discussion about abortions have become so warped because they all centre the foetus as a separate entity, not as part of a pregnant person. I think making this decision is so stigmatised in the Netherlands and in other Western countries because Christian conservatism is embedded in our laws, in the fabric of our society and our debates. Although countries like the Netherlands and the UK have progressive laws, abortion is still regulated under the criminal code.

To this day, we simply don’t hear enough stories about unwanted pregnancies. For me, talking about my abortion was incredibly helpful, although no one should feel pressured to do so. We’ll only start tearing the stigma down if more people put their different experiences and perspectives out there to show how they’re all valid and able to coexist. It could also open the door to more comprehensive and empathetic care before and after the procedure. That’s why, despite my shame, I decided to tell my story. Because I know how important it is to realise you’re not alone.

The post There Are No Stigma-Free Abortions, Even in ‘Progressive’ Countries appeared first on VICE.

“Can you imagine it? 37 seats!” Wilders said in near disbelief in the wake of his party’s huge presence in the 150-seat parliament, after finishing in first place with 23.6 percent of the national vote, and securing 12 seats more than its closest rival. 

The shock outcome has turned Dutch politics on its head, raising fears it has cemented the mainstreaming of Wilders’ far-right politics in the Netherlands, and that it could augur a wider lurch to the far-right in other European countries. It’s left the country pondering what the future could look like if the bleach-haired, 60-year-old populist, whose manifesto calls for a ban on Islamic schools, Qur’ans, mosques and Islamic headscarves, actually becomes prime minister – a matter that will be resolved through complicated coalition negotiations with other parties.

READ: A far-right anti-Islam firebrand won the Dutch elections

In the meantime though, one question political scientists have been focusing on is: how did this happen?

“It was not a surprise his PVV would be one of the largest parties, but this huge win – it took everyone by surprise, ” Stijn van Kessel, associate professor of European politics at Queen Mary University of London told VICE News.

“It’s largely due to a normalisation of far right politics. You could say that the type of politics that Wilders stands for is not automatically considered beyond the pale any more.”

Van Kessel said Wilders’ growth in popularity had been driven by the same mix of anxieties over immigration and its impacts that has seen support for the far right find fertile ground across Europe. In Italy, the government is led by Giorgia Meloni, of the right-wing populist Brothers of Italy. In Sweden, the government is supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats, and in France, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen finished second in last year’s presidential elections.

“Clearly societies are getting very polarised,” said van Kessel.

But what really helped to shift the needle for Wilders’ party in the Dutch election, political scientists believe, was the behaviour of the mainstream parties. In particular, the failure of the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) to ward off the threat posed by the far-right, by co-opting and giving credence to Wilders’ views on immigration.

Immigration was a central issue on the campaign trail, as it had played a key role in the collapse of the VVD-led coalition government in July, amid a failure to agree on how to limit the number of asylum seekers. The VVD promised a harder line on immigration during the campaign, pledging in its manifesto to “regain control.” But political scientists say this merely legitimised the PVV’s anti-immigration agenda. 

Rachid Azrout, an assistant professor of political communication at the University of Amsterdam told VICE News that while the centre-right VVD party hoped they could take ownership of the issue and thus profit from immigration being a main topic in the campaign, “the actual issue-owner of immigration is” Wilders’ party.

The centre-right party’s second mistake, say political scientists, was to signal during the campaign that they would potentially be open to working with Wilder’s party, which mainstream parties have typically shunned working with in the past. This had the unintended consequence of further bolstering the PVV’s credentials as a legitimate political prospect and a party with the potential to enter government, encouraging many potential supporters to cast their vote for the party.

“This meant … that a vote for the PVV was not a ‘wasted’ vote anymore, as the party could actually get into power,” said Azrout. “The PVV was [for a] long time not a sensible alternative, as the PVV could not deliver. That has changed [in] this campaign.”

In response, Wilders moderated his more extreme rhetoric in a bid to present himself as someone capable of governing, saying he had more pressing priorities than his trademark hardline anti-Islam positions, and that he was prepared to put policies such as a potential ban on mosques “in the fridge” for the time being. 

“Wilders moderated his rhetoric without really changing his key positions,” said van Kessel, pointing out that while the PVV leader had stopped publicly campaigning on some of his more extreme policies, there was no suggestion that he had abandoned those beliefs.

Azrout said he did not believe that the strong support for the PVV indicated that the Dutch voting public had become significantly more anti-immigrant, and that they all shared Wilders’ extreme positions on Islam. 

“There has for a long time been a substantial group of voters that feel concerned about immigration and issues related to immigration,” he said.

“These people … feel that the traditional parties have not delivered on that issue, and are now allowing the PVV to give it a try.” 

Whether Wilders gets the opportunity to implement his policies now hangs on the outcome of complex negotiations to form a coalition. Van Kessel said the right-wing parties viewed as potential coalition partners with PVV – the VVD and the recently-formed New Social Contract – are divided internally over whether to cooperate with the far-right party, although there appeared to be a clear appetite among their voters for them to attempt to form a coalition.

“There is still this stigma, which is understandable because this is a really far-right party, with quite extreme ideas,” said van Kessel.

Coalition talks could drag on for months – the previous government took a record 271 days to agree on a deal. But what is clear in the meantime – and a potential lesson to other countries – is that the centre-right’s tactics in attempting to blunt the threat of the PVV had backfired spectacularly.

“With the knowledge of hindsight, we can say the VVD’s strategy has completely failed,” said van Kessel. 

“Trying to copy the far right is a risky strategy, as it primarily legitimises their agenda and helps them grow further.”

The post How Far-Right Provocateur Geert Wilders Pulled Off a Shock Election Win appeared first on VICE.

“To all the autoworkers out there working without the benefits of a union, now it’s your turn,” said UAW president Shawn Fain in a video released on Wednesday. “Go to uaw.org/join. The money is there. The time is right. And the answer is simple. You don’t have to live paycheck to paycheck. You don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay your rent or feed your family while the company makes billions. A better life is out there.” The release stated that thousands of non-union workers were already signing union pledge cards on the website.

The companies that the union plans to organize include Mercedes Benz, Toyota, and Tesla, as well as other companies in the EV sector. After the UAW strike concluded, Toyota and other manufacturers raised their wages by around 10 percent, which Fain called the “UAW bump.”

Workers at Tesla in the U.S. are not unionized, though some facilities have made initial efforts towards organizing and faced retaliation for doing so. They had thus far not been affected by the strike.

However, Tesla repair technicians in Sweden went on strike earlier this month after Elon Musk refused to meet and bargain with their union. German automotive sectoral unions have also been working to unionize Tesla’s gigafactory in the country, and won workers a four percent pay raise after holding informational events about unionization in the factory. Labor experts told Motherboard at the time that the surge of Tesla labor organizing in Europe, combined with the UAW’s success in the U.S., could open doorways for U.S. Tesla workers to organize.

Do you work at Tesla? Do you know more about this union drive? We’d love to hear from you. From a non-work device, you can contact Jules Roscoe at jules.roscoe@vice.com or on Signal at (415) 763-7705 for more security.

“Unions are organized on an international level,” said Branislav Rugani, the international confederal secretary for French trade union Force Ouvrière, in a phone call to Motherboard at the time. “They talk amongst themselves. When they return to their respective countries, they organize on a local level.”

The UAW’s drive is expected to cover almost 150,000 auto workers across “at least thirteen” companies, the union’s press release stated. It named as targets the German automakers Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW; the Asian automakers Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Subaru, and Mazda; and the EV automakers Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid.

The post ‘Your Turn’: United Auto Workers Launches Campaign to Unionize Tesla appeared first on VICE.

Isa Balado was reporting on a robbery in Madrid for the Cuatro channel when a man approached her and appeared to grope her bottom on camera.

The programme’s host Nacho Abad asked Balado to show the man, who he called an “idiot,” on camera.

“As much as you want to ask what channel we are from, do you really have to touch my bottom? I’m doing a live show and I’m working,” Balado told him.

The man then denied touching her, and attempted to touch her head as he walked away.

Spanish police said in a message on X, formerly Twitter, that a man had been arrested on Tuesday for sexually assaulting a reporter.

Spain’s Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz commented on the incident on X, saying it should not go unpunished. “It is machismo that makes journalists suffer sexual assaults like this, and the aggressors are unrepentant in front of the camera.”

The incident comes after huge debate and controversy in Spain over the head of the country’s football federation kissing a player at the women’s World Cup last month.

Luis Rubiales has now resigned as the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation after kissing Jenni Hermoso on the lips. He is due in court later this week to testify on the incident.

The post Man Arrested After Spanish Reporter Groped Live On Air appeared first on VICE.

European police officials have confirmed reports that Turkey denied extradition requests from Belgium for two Balkan men accused of smuggling tons of cocaine from 2020 to 2022 after the suspects purchased Turkish citizenship in the months before the request.

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Gangsters Have a New Way of Avoiding Capture: Becoming Turkish

Turkey refused to extradite Bosnian Sani al Murdaa and ​​Albanian Fljamur Sinanaj at the request of Belgian prosecutors in July, because both men had purchased Turkish citizenship for about $500,000 each, earlier this year after fleeing Sarajevo and Belgrade as Belgium issued Interpol red notices for their arrest. 

The issue of fugitives using the Turkish visa program to avoid arrest came to light last year after Dutch authorities complained that another widely sought accused cocaine trafficker Jos Leijdekkers, aka “Bolle Jos” (chunky boss), was operating his cartel with impunity from Turkey after receiving Turkish citizenship. Turkey has thus far refused to arrest Leydeckers, but did raid business suspected of links to his operation and made seizures of close to 1 billion Turkish lira (around $36 million).

From messages recovered from the Sky-ECC hack – which compromised millions of texts from encrypted phones used by gangsters – Murdaa and Sinanaj were linked to at least 3.2 tons of cocaine intercepted in Antwerp’s port from 2020 to 2022 on behalf of the infamous Serbo-Montenegrin Skaljar cartel.

Belgian prosecutors, police and foreign ministry officials did not respond to requests for comment on the record, but a Belgian Federal Police official confirmed the details of the situation to VICE News on the condition of background because of diplomatic concerns.

“UAE has long been the major problem in terms of bringing cocaine-milieu suspects to trial but there is an increasing concern that Turkey’s Golden Visa policies make it very easy for anyone with cash to become a citizen almost overnight,” said the official. “And Turkey categorically refuses to extradite its citizens, even if they spent their entire lives in Holland, Bosnia or Serbia and carry no Turkish blood or family ties.”

A second European law enforcement official, who cannot be named for security reasons and refused to be directly quoted, said that Murdaa is a well known associate of Edin Gačanin, aka Tito, a notorious Bosnian trafficker believed based in Dubai, indicted for running a massive cocaine smuggling operation between South America and the ports of Belgium and the Netherlands. Murdaa’s half-sister, believed by authorities to be Gačanin’s business and one-time romantic partner, manages key businesses in Sarajevo that prosecutors allege are fronts for cartel money laundering, according to Sky-ECC transcripts provided to BiH prosecutors and reported in the Bosnian media.

Murdaa and Sinanaj are also connected to the Skaljar cartel, according to the Interpol notices, which were described to VICE.

The European law enforcement official said that the five-year-old war between Skaljar and its rival cartel, the Kavak clan, which has killed an estimated 50 people across Europe and South America, had left leadership positions open that Murdaa would fill as both cartels appeared to be relocating to Istanbul from the Balkans. 

Jovan Vukotić, a major figure in the Skaljar cartel, was assassinated in Istanbul on September 8, 2022, which led Turkish police to arrest several men accused of the murder on behalf of the Kavak cartel. During the investigation into the murders, Turkish police found evidence that led them to arrest Zavak boss, Željko Bojanić, not only for Vukotić’s murder, but added charges he’d tortured another member of the Skaljar to death in Bojanić’s luxury villa on the Bosphorus. 

“Turkey can’t extradite its citizens but it can try them for torturing rival gangsters to death in Turkey,” said the Belgian police official. 

Turkey’s reputation as a safe haven for drug cartels took another public relations hit last June after an infamous gangster, who was banned from holding public office for his criminal convictions, celebrated his birthday with a cake depicting an assault rifle on a stack of US currency that appeared to have cocaine pouring out of it. 

Cengiz Şıklaroğlu’s post in June, shot on a boat showed a cake emblazoned with his nickname “Çerkez” along with “No Illegal, Yes Sugardady”. 

Şıklaroğlu has a reputation for flamboyance and ties to criminal activity in Turkey. He was elected to parliament, representing the central Turkish city of Sivas in 2015, but was prevented from taking up his seat because of previous criminal convictions that led to a 10-month jail sentence in 2016. He was convicted over charges his company extorted Syrian refugees, after being found to have forced them to sign their valuables over to his company in exchange for resettlement aid. He arrived at prison to serve his sentence at the head of a 100-strong vehicle convoy. 

In a video at what appeared to be his birthday party, which picked up 15.2k likes in the 30 plus days since it was posted, Şıklaroğlu could be seen toasting the crowd and standing with the cake.

From 2005 to 2010, Şıklaroğlu was investigated in both Turkey and Russia on a wide range of charges ranging from extortion to drug smuggling to the attempted assassination of Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but was repeatedly acquitted of the charges. 

Şıklaroğlu runs multiple commercial enterprises around Turkey and enjoys running a YouTube channel dedicated to his lifestyle, exploits, and Al Capone. Şıklaroğlu, aka “Çerkez Cengiz” or “Circassian Cengiz,” is usually dedicated to his love and ownership of exotic animals including big cats, poisonous snakes, bears and crocodiles. He is still rumoured to be involved with organised crime.  

VICE News attempted to contact Şıklaroğlu for an interview or comment via multiple social media channels, but got no response.

Main photo credit: JOS LEIJDEKKERS, AKA “BOLLE JOS” (CHUNKY BOSS). PHOTO: POLICE HANDOUT

The post Turkey Faces Fresh Allegations of Harbouring Cocaine Traffickers appeared first on VICE.

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The Taliban Said It Banned Opium. But Business Is Still Booming.

How to respond to the Taliban’s opium ban is a multi-dimensional policy dilemma with many potential outcomes, and most of them are a different flavour of bad. A continued ban supported by the West could trigger civil war and a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, another migration calamity, and a fresh wave of fatal drug overdoses that would dwarf the death toll in North America. Angle for an end to the ban and the world’s biggest heroin industry whirls back into action again, and it’s business as usual.

The West is in two minds. The UN warns of “severe and far-reaching” consequences of a heroin shortage, while providing millions of dollars in alternative livelihood funding to wean Afghan farmers off growing the plants that produce it.

Behind closed doors, governments fear a shortage of the crop could prompt international traffickers to pump deadly fentanyl into the world’s heroin supplies. There are whispers the Taliban could be using the ban as a political stunt, or even colluding with drug gangs to raise the price of opium.

As jobless poppy farming families start abandoning their fields to seek refuge in Europe, and the body count starts rising in regions opposed to the opium ban, experts tell VICE News that its a policy dilemma riddled with intrigue and political manoeuvring, where those at the sharp end – whatever transpires – are the global poor.  

Afghanistan’s poppy-growing industry – which produces at least 80 percent of the world’s heroin – has its seeds in the country’s war with the USSR. During the 1980s, the invading Soviet troops laid waste to the country’s agricultural system. As a result, one of the only crops farmers could grow and sell was opium poppies. By the 1990s Afghanistan had replaced countries such as Myanmar in the Golden Triangle as the world’s major supplier of heroin. The opium trade became a central part of the Afghan economy, from the peasant farmers who depended on the crop for survival to those running the country who received huge kickbacks from the trade. It is estimated the country’s opium economy is worth between £1.4 billion and £2.2 billion, amounts to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP, and provides around 450,000 jobs.

In 2001 the US launched the so-called War on Terror in response to the 9/11 attacks. Its first main thrust was the US-led invasion of Afghanistan to hunt down those behind the attack, Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and overthrow the country’s ruling Taliban government that was sheltering them. The West also turned its sights on Afghanistan’s opium trade, which it saw as an important financial resource for terrorism. 

“The biggest drugs hoard in the world is in Afghanistan, controlled by the Taliban. It is a regime founded on fear and funded by the drugs trade,” UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech to the Labour Party Conference at the time. “Ninety per cent of the heroin on British streets originates in Afghanistan. The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people, buying their drugs on British streets. That is another part of their regime that we should seek to destroy.”

Oddly, that same year, the Taliban had actually banned opium production, dramatically reducing it from 3,276 metric tons in 2000 to 185 metric tons in 2001. By 2002, after the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 – which was hastened by the unpopularity of the ban – opium production had returned to levels in 2000. 

After the fall of the Taliban, while British troops were stationed in Afghanistan under a NATO mandate, it was the UK’s brief to oversee counter-narcotics work. Yet as opium production levels increased to record levels of 6,700 tons in 2006, the UK and US clashed on how this should be done. The White House wanted to speed up manual crop eradication with aerial crop spraying, a tactic it had used to combat the coca plantations in Colombia. But then Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the British, keen to win the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, preferred less antagonistic methods, including broader development programmes such as help to grow alternative crops and getting jobs in cities, and the US plans were dropped. 

In his 2011 book, Cables from Kabul, former UK Ambassador to Afghanistan Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, derided the West’s attempts at dealing with the opium trade, including a secret crop spraying programme in Nangarhar, eastern Afghanistan, in 2002 ordered by the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, William “Chemical Bill” Wood, nicknamed due to his eagerness to spray coca plants when he was Ambassador in Colombia. Crop spraying was so hated by the Afghans that when the British army sent soldiers into Helmand in 2006 they were so worried about the reaction they dropped leaflets saying “We’re not here to destroy your crops.” At one stage, recalled Cowper-Coles, the British ran a secret, £25 million year-long programme to buy up and destroy opium crops, which he described as “ludicrous”. 

Between 2002 and 2017, the US government allocated $1.46 billion on alternative development aid projects designed to reduce poppy cultivation by increasing legal economic alternatives. In the last 2010s, the US army spent tens of millions of dollars blowing up heroin and meth labs in Afghanistan, although later it was revealed that many of the labs were just huts.

In total, the US has spent around $9 billion on various projects such as crop substitution, poppy eradication and counter narcotics policing to try and stem the flood of opium coming out of Afghanistan since 2002. Over the same period the US spent $144.98 billion in funds for reconstruction and related activities in the country, with the UK spending £3.5 billion in aid. Yet a 2019 report to the US Congress admitted that despite all the money being spent on trying to move Afghanistan away from its reliance on opium, production had reached record levels and that “eradication efforts have had minimal impact on curbing opium-poppy cultivation”. 

Nevertheless, the West is still pinning its hopes on relatively small-scale programmes as a way of moving Afghans away from the poppy. One UN programme claims to have helped 8,000 families in Helmand and Kandahar provinces swap the opium trade for other livelihoods such as chicken farming. 

In August 2021, the West’s 20-year mission in Afghanistan collapsed when the Taliban routed the armies of Afghanistan’s Western-backed government, seized Kabul and returned to power. The following April the Taliban’s supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada decreed a strict ban on growing poppies and the opium trade, because of its harmful effects and because it contradicts their Islamic beliefs. 

The ban came at a bad time for poppy farmers. Afghanistan’s economy has been on the brink of collapse since the Taliban returned, and the country faced extreme levels of hunger. According to the World Food Programme more than half the population face acute food insecurity. As an exclusive investigation in Afghanistan carried out for VICE News last year by Elise Blanchard found, farmers were slow to conform to the ban and trade continued despite the decree.

But by June this year it became apparent the ban for the new poppy season had been largely effective with an “unprecedented” reduction in opium production, falling 80 percent. In reining-in Afghanistan’s heroin trade, the Taliban had achieved – for the time being – what the West had failed to do in two decades of counter-narcotics programmes. 

Some are convinced that with the Taliban’s AK-47-policed ban and Western money to support some farmers away from opium, Afghanistan’s opium trade is under threat. European governments and law enforcement agencies have been dreaming of its end since heroin-related addiction and gangsterism hit hard in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet this old desire to root out and kill off the heroin trade is now tinged with a nagging fear that doing so could open the door to something far worse 

Mexican cartels started replacing heroin with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger, in North America’s drug supplies in the mid 2010s because importing and making it was cheaper and easier to traffick than heroin. Fentanyl was also used to make fake opioid pills. The inclusion of fentanyl, first alongside and increasingly instead of heroin, created the most deadly fatal drug overdose crisis in history. Now in the US, around 70,000 of the 100,000 drug related deaths each year involve synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl. In Canada too, deaths from synthetic opioids have spiralled.  

So far, outside of North America, the presence of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in the heroin market has been relatively small scale. This has been put down to major suppliers concluding that there is such abundant supply of the real thing out of Afghanistan, it’s not worth the bother of switching it out for synthetics such as fentanyl. 

Even so, the spectre of a North American style opioid death crisis spreading worldwide, is a horrifying one. If heroin is switched out with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl at a global level, it could make the death toll in the US and Canada look small by comparison. There are around 1 million heroin users in the US, but an estimated 30 million globally, most of whom live in poverty. 

As Paul Griffiths, scientific director of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction said earlier this year: “It seems strange to say this, but almost in terms of synthetics, the high availability of heroin at the moment is … arguably a protective factor.”

In the past few years, synthetic opioids have been popping up with more frequency in Europe, albeit at a very low level compared to the US. A global heroin shortage is now a possibility due to the Taliban’s anti-opium stance. There are fears that as more poppy farms vanish in Afghanistan, the more likely a deadly global shift from heroin to fentanyl becomes. Rightly, European governments are on high alert in case heroin suppliers start to put synthetic opioids into the narcotic food chain.

An extended opium ban could be bad news on a number of levels, David Mansfield, a leading expert on Afghanistan’s drugs trade who worked alongside satellite imagery company Alcis to track the dramatic plunge in poppy cultivation in the last year, told VICE News. 

“There are three main dimensions to this dilemma. Were the Taliban to pursue the ban over consecutive years, the economic consequences within Afghanistan could cause a humanitarian disaster and a steep rise in migration out of the country,” said Mansfield. Those working in Afghanistan have told VICE News they have seen an uptick in people from poppy farming families affected by the ban turning up on the south west border seeking passage to Europe. 

The Taliban have experienced armed resistance to the ban in some poppy-growing regions. In the north eastern province of Badakhshan opium production has increased, while in the eastern province of Nangarhar local communities have been involved in fighting against the Taliban’s efforts to enforce the ban. Mansfield said a continuation of the ban could create “political instability and a fracturing of power” and a “push back against the ban in areas where the government has never had a historical presence”. 

“The reality is we’ve got a relatively stable opiate drug using population, do we really want to have that genie come out of the box? Obviously were they not to continue the ban, then nothing changes, the opium trade continues as normal. It’s a really difficult scenario for policymakers because there are no good options here,” said Mansfield. 

In an article for Alcis, Mansfield summed up the policy dilemma in Afghanistan: “As things currently stand, western governments may need to calibrate their response to the Taliban ban based on the outcomes they consider least undesirable. It is not possible to provide sufficient development assistance to stem the eventual return of poppy cultivation, but to press the Taliban to continue the ban could prompt a dramatic increase in outmigration and destabilise the regime in Kabul. Some may well decide that a continued flow of drugs from Afghanistan may be the least worst outcome.”  

This year in its World Drug Report the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime recognised the “severe” and “far reaching” effects a serious disruption in the supply of poppy and heroin could have on the world’s heroin users. But at the same time it continues to fund a series of alternative development projects aimed at reducing poppy farming. 

At the crux of this dilemma is how serious the Taliban is about maintaining the ban. Part of this is about why they did it in the first place. The Taliban’s supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada likely decided it was a good thing to do because he is a religious zealot. But Mansfield said despite its religious coating, it may have also been primarily a political move. 

“There will be other elements of the Taliban who are a bit more politically savvy, who may have argued well, ‘this is a good thing to do, because we’re shutting girls schools, so this is a great distraction for the international community and while they think we’re bad on women, they think we’re good on drugs’. They see a ban on opium being a favour to the world, ‘the world needs to pay and provide assistance with no strings attached, without discussing their record on women and human rights’.”

This strategy would be no surprise. It was the Taliban’s way of thinking during the last ban in 2001. Mullah Mohammed Hassan Rahmani, the Regional Governor for the South Western Region, said at the time: “The Taliban has done its bit and the international community should not mix politics with drugs – this is a humanitarian issue. If the international community wants drug control in Afghanistan it needs to separate the issues of politics and drugs. Neither short term nor long term assistance [in response to the ban] should be related to politics.”

There is a chance the ban was always going to be a temporary measure, a move by the Taliban to gain favour with, and potentially get aid money moving from with the West, raise opium prices and then rescind the ban claiming the West did not offer enough help. Antonio Giustozzi, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defence and security think tank, said the Taliban may have even been in contact with heroin traffickers to collude in a ban. “There is a possibility the Taliban gathered the big producers, the big heroin gangs, around the table and warned them in advance of the ban so they can buy and stockpile more heroin, guaranteeing them the ban would end in two or three years, so basically negotiating some kind of deal with them.”

He also speculated that the ban could be used by the Taliban to try and deprive regional leaders of their revenue and thus gain more power, especially if the Taliban themselves can come up with alternative income streams. 

Giustozzi said that for the Taliban, the ban could be a “win-win” situation. “It could make significant progress towards obtaining recognition from the West, plus some financial aid, while the ban also serves the purpose of pushing heroin prices up.” 

But Mansfield does not believe the ban, even if it’s sincere, is sustainable. He thinks the financial impact on Afghanistan’s farmers, and the armed resistance, will be felt long before the West’s alternative livelihood programmes have any meaningful impact.

“You can’t fix the problem [of the country’s reliance on the opium trade] in the timeframe required to make a difference to the farmers who are suffering from this ban,” he said. “The ban cannot be sustained without significant levels of either violence or out-migration.”

Mansfield said the ban will not immediately impact global heroin supplies, because of opium stockpiles. For years Afghan opium farmers have been producing a surplus of opium and burying it on their farms because they know it will likely only increase in value, especially if there is ever a shortage and opium prices go up. 

“Some farmers have more than 500 kilos stored up, buried in holes in the ground or in their homes,” said Mansfield. “When the ban was announced last year and the news spread to all the farmers on WhatsApp, the chatter was all about storing up your opium. Some farmers sold their motorbike because their wife was ill, or they sold other household assets, rather than sell their opium stocks. Because the motorbike is only going to lose value while the opium would acquire value.”

“Opium stores well. Maybe longer than 10 years. I know people who have stored opium for longer than that, if dried and stored properly. Traders will be sitting on some of this opium as well. If the second year of a ban comes in, you know, these guys are the ones rubbing their hands, because the price will shoot up even further.” 

Mansfield said because of these stockpiles the ban on opium production could take at least a year or two to have any impact on Europe’s heroin supplies. He said that recent rises in prices of heroin in the UK were not necessarily linked to the ban, and that a shift in the market towards synthetic opioids may come about regardless of any genuine shortages. 

No Western government official would dare say it out loud, but Afghanistan’s opium trade, the source of most of the world’s heroin, a drug which has for decades been viewed as the narcotic public enemy number one, the scourge of Western society, is something of a necessary evil, a malignant friend. Even though the opium ban will be hard for the Taliban to sustain, and may need to go on for consecutive years to create a heroin shortage, the sheer scale of the disaster if synthetic opioids did end up being laced into the world’s heroin supply means it’s a scenario that cannot be ignored. 

It was the Mexican cartels who made the decision to do the unthinkable in the drug selling world, to start mixing fentanyl into heroin supplies, something they knew was going to kill off a sizable chunk of their US market. Now in some parts of the US and Canada, heroin has been totally replaced by fentanyl. Up until then the drug dealing 101 had been “don’t kill your customer.” But it seems the cartel accountants had figured out they could still make a good profit from selling cheap and highly potent fentanyl even if they were killing off 70,000 of America’s 1 million heroin users every year – especially if they branched out by putting fentanyl into more socially acceptable opioid pills. 

The global heroin supply outside of North America could be adulterated by drug gangs at multiple points along supply routes. Synthetic opioids could be added into the mix in Afghanistan itself, where labs are capable of processing opium into street ready heroin hydrochloride. It could be added further down the trafficking line in Turkey, before it is shifted into Europe. 

Or drug organisations could decide to entirely swap out heroin for synthetic opioids, which can be done anywhere. Mexican cartel cooks, who honed their fentanyl making skills during the COVID pandemic, are already working with Dutch-based drug gangs to produce meth in the Netherlands, and there is the potential they could also start pumping out a new brand of “European heroin” that would contain no actual heroin, but just caffeine and other fillers dotted with tiny amounts of super strong synthetic opioids. This could happen regardless of any heroin shortage, but a rise in heroin prices, and price gouging due to an ongoing opium ban, could prompt the cartels to join with European organised crime groups to produce such a product.   

“Synthetic opioids are clearly already in the system in Europe and in the UK. Not to any huge extent. But I’m not sure if that’s got anything to do necessarily, with what’s going on in Afghanistan,” said Harry Shapiro, director of drug information charity DrugWise and author of Fierce Chemistry: a History of UK Drug Wars.  

“I think it’s probably more the case of traffickers and chemists having a look at what’s going on in the US and thinking ‘hang on a minute, we can make a heck of a lot more money if we use synthetic opioids for a lot less hassle than 5,000 miles of tracking heroin across from Afghanistan to Europe. We can cook this stuff up in Bulgaria, in Holland, anywhere you like’. 

“I think that there may be a connection between the opium ban and a rise in synthetic opioids in Europe, but I’m more likely to think that it’s what’s been going on in the States that might dictate our future opioid market. 

“In terms of public health, it takes quite a long time to get addicted to heroin. It’s not something that happens overnight. The trouble with fentanyl and all its various analogues is, and this sounds like a headline from The Sun, it’s not ‘one hit, and you’re hooked’, for first time users it’s more, one hit and you’re dead’. Which is why you’re seeing these huge spike in drug overdoses in the States because this stuff is fucking powerful.” 

The UK government is keeping a close eye on the threat posed by synthetic opioids to its estimated 300,000 heroin users, although it is hobbled by the fact its forensic drug testing services have been whittled down to the bare bones by cost cutting over the last two decades. Policy makers or governments, who’ve witnessed the deadly impact of fentanyl replacing heroin in North America, should be doing everything they can to avert this situation, experts say.

Mansfield, who spent more than two decades conducting fieldwork in Afghanistan and has produced much of the primary research on the subject, including a review of the US government efforts on counternarcotics in Afghanistan, said that responses to the opium dilemma have often been short term and poorly considered. 

“Policy makers rarely understood how elemental drugs were to the political economy of Afghanistan, and therefore failed to properly integrate efforts to address it in the overall reconstruction effort,” he said. “Instead, a counter narcotics strand was established, a menu of limited activities, like so called ‘alternative livelihoods’, that were often poorly designed and could not address the underlying causes of opium production.

Is there a prospect thatWestern diplomats, fearful of the spectre of fentanyl in Europe, could be briefing in secret against the continuation of the opium ban? 

Giustozzi, the research fellow for RUSI, said it was unlikely, but not impossible. 

“It doesn’t take much for somebody’s behind the scenes to encourage a certain type of argument. So for example, suddenly there could be a lot of funding for detailed studies showing the negative economic impact of the ban on Afghanistan.”

Behind the drug war rhetoric, the UK government knows the illegal drug trade and its artificially inflated profits have assisted some poor communities not just in making a living, but escaping poverty. Research funded by the UK involving field work in Afghanistan, Colombia and Myanmar, concluded that while destructive and dangerous, the drug trade can help poor communities survive and prosper in some of the world’s most unstable and war-torn countries. “Simplistic narratives of drugs as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for poverty alleviation are to be cautioned against,” Jonathan Goodhand, Professor of Conflict Studies at SOAS University of London, told VICE News in 2020. He described the assumption that the drug trade is always counter to peace, social advancement and survival in these regions as “deeply flawed”. 

Those fighting the spread of heroin and cocaine over the last century would be shocked to be told that the much maligned opium trade could well be a precious thing – a key defence against a global drug death epidemic that could result in annual deaths reaching millions.  

But perhaps, as Europe faces a dilemma over how best to avert and cope with such a catastrophe, the Taliban’s opium ban may be something of a red herring. 

In all likelihood the ban will not last. It would be a disaster for hundreds of thousands of Afghan people, for the country and for the Taliban themselves, who may decide to overlook their religious principles if the ban hits them politically and threatens their power. It may be that the decision to start swapping out heroin for synthetic opioids in Europe and Asia’s supply is made irrespective of what is going on in Afghanistan. 

Here, as they were in North America, the biggest threat is the big Mexican cartels, such as the Sinaloa, who with increasing involvement in meth production in Europe, could decide to pivot into the continent’s huge heroin trade by making and supplying cheap fentanyl. 

Either way, the global rise of potent, cheap, lab-made synthetic drugs such fentanyl, tranq dope, Spice and meth – an inevitable result of decades of drug prohibition – now presents a new and more dangerous adversary to authorities and governments than that posed by traditional plant-based drugs such as coca, cannabis and heroin. 

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