If it had been in Florida, last week's seizure of 700kg of pure cocaine at Sierra Leone's main airport could have passed for an extract from one of Carl Hiaasen's novels. A special Red Cross flight into Lungi was given permission from an unspecified government official to make an unscheduled landing. A group of South and North Americans then leaped out of the plane and fled through a hole in the perimeter fence. Most were later rounded up.
In reality, these events are far from comic. They represent the greatest threat to the stability of the fragile West African country since its emergence from an atrocious civil war. All the hard development work undertaken in Sierra Leone threatens to be undone, the latest victim of a Washington-inspired war on drugs that has not the slightest hope of success. This policy is now wrecking entire countries while leaving our own inner cities devastated as the retail narcotics market fuels violence and despair.
Since the early 1990s the consumption of drugs has been increasing. But as the market fizzes skywards, there has been no concomitant increase in money for police to combat the problem. The war on drugs works on the assumption that law enforcement has the capacity to throttle production at source and prevent the consumer getting hold of it. But in the last 20 years, production has gone haywire, and purchasing drugs is now easier for teenagers in Britain than buying alcohol or cigarettes.
Afghanistan provides the most dramatic example of how our drugs policies are undermining strategic interests in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. In 2003 the Taliban was a defeated force and the west had the first opportunity in more than a century to help the country with a proper economic development programme. Instead, we were distracted by the Iraq folly.
Afghanistan was forgotten by all except the remnants of the Taliban. They seized the opportunity by refinancing themselves - largely through the 10% tax they impose on the opium trade. Now, according to the UN drugs tsar, Antonio Maria Costa, the Taliban is earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year from opium. And the weapons they are buying with these funds are rendering Nato's war there unwinnable. We are heading for an Afghanistan that will be home to Islamic militants and an unstoppable heroin industry with Nato going home, its tail between its legs.
The time has come to shout from every rooftop that the war on drugs hands billions of pounds on a plate to criminal syndicates and terrorist organisations every year. Senior policymakers, police commanders and politicians have all told me in private that the war on drugs does nothing to halt the flow of product to market. But they are all too frightened to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy.
Those who favour prohibition argue that legalisation will lead to an increase in consumption. But drug usage is already endemic, from the favelas of Rio to the restaurants and clubs of Kensington and Chelsea, where local officials recently discovered cocaine in 95% of all establishments tested. Traces have even been found in parliament, and the German Bundestag. The dam restraining consumption levels broke 20 years ago, and nobody has the money or materials to do anything about it.
Drugs are a huge public health problem but, by absenting themselves from the market, states around the world are ensuring that they cannot regulate any aspect of it. Levels of drug-related violence now threaten everybody's security. The Brown government's response is to toggle cannabis between B and C classification - a policy that demonstrates a staggering depth of ignorance with regard to the real world.
Misha Glenny, the author of McMafia.