The headlines shriek with self-congratulation: Australia’s largest cocaine seizure, a staggering 2.4 tonnes, hauled from a fishing vessel off the coast of Queensland. The usual panoply of politicians and police chiefs pat each other on the back, invoking the familiar bromides about ‘saving lives’ and ‘disrupting organised crime’. But let us, for a moment, resist the facile applause and ask what this truly signifies.
The intelligence that made this coup possible came from the UK’s Border Force, a fact that ought to give us pause. The British state, which once policed the world through naval supremacy, now gathers intelligence on drug shipments in the Antipodes. This is not the Empire of old, with its frigates and gunboats, but a ghost of it, a shadow network of information-sharing agreements and joint task forces. We are witnessing the strange afterlife of British imperialism, a spectral authority that still haunts the global order even as the mother country retreats into parochial concerns about Brexit and the cost of living.
But what of the haul itself? Two tonnes of cocaine represents a vast sum of money, as much as a billion Australian dollars on the street. Whose money is this? Who consumes it? The usual narrative points to nefarious cartels, faceless villains in distant jungles. Yet the cocaine trade is only profitable because of demand, and that demand is overwhelmingly Western, affluent, and urban. Every line snorted in a Sydney penthouse or a London club is a vote for the cartels, a small, selfish act of complicity in a global calamity. The Australian middle class, with its brash confidence and love of excess, is as much a part of this story as any Colombian farmer or Mexican sicario.
There is also the matter of historical parallel. The Fall of Rome, so often invoked by commentators of my stripe, offers a grim lesson. Rome did not fall to barbarians until it had first rotted from within. The late Empire was awash in opium, a trade that enriched the state even as it sapped the vitality of the people. The Romans built baths, aqueducts, and amphitheatres; we build skate parks, craft breweries, and cryptocurrency exchanges. The trappings change, the underlying pattern remains. A society that can produce 2.4 tonnes of cocaine for its own consumption is a society that has lost its way, that has mistaken sensation for meaning, pleasure for purpose.
I do not mean to deny the competence of the authorities. The seizure is a genuine victory for law enforcement, a demonstration that international cooperation can still yield results. But let us not mistake tactics for strategy. Every shipload intercepted, every dealer arrested, is a pinprick in a haemorrhaging wound. The drug trade is not a problem to be solved by policing; it is a symptom of a civilisation in decline. We have created a world of such sterile boredom, such profound spiritual emptiness, that a powder from the other side of the planet seems a fair trade for an hour’s oblivion.
The British intelligence that made this bust possible is a reminder of what once was: a global system of order maintained by a confident, purposeful power. Today, that power is spent, its remnants preserved in memo chains and secure databases. The British Empire is gone, but its ghost has been summoned to interrupt a cargo of cocaine. How fitting, how sad, how Roman. We are picking at the lint of our own destruction while pretending to fight a war on drugs. The truth is starker: we are losing, have lost, a war against ourselves. And the biggest cocaine bust in history will not change that. It merely confirms it.
