How recreational drug use contributes to environmental damage

The environmental impact of drug use is obvious in many parts of Ireland. Used needles and crack pipes are common sights on some city streets, while discarded nitrous oxide canisters have started to become a litter headache for local authorities. That is just the illegal drugs, with discarded cigarette butts and alcohol containers an even bigger problem in most areas.

However, these issues are dwarfed by the impact of the drug trade further up the production chain. There are many moral arguments against taking illegal drugs, but one that is rarely discussed is the devastating impact their production has on environments and vulnerable communities around the world, particularly in South America and central Asia.

There is growing evidence that cocaine production in countries like Colombia and opium cultivation in Afghanistan are drastically altering the ecosystems in those regions and putting millions of people at risk.

Elsewhere, cannabis production is putting increasing strain on water supplies, a problem that has only increased with the legalisation of the drug in places such as the US.

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In many ways, it is an old story. Whenever there are large scale changes to land use, it has several impacts on local climates, says climatologist Prof Peter Thorne, professor of physical geography at Maynooth University.

“The southeast USA, which was deforested to make way for tobacco plantations and then subsequently reforested, is a case study of this,” he says, adding that such drastic changes in land use cause “large scale changes in atmospheric motion and temperature and humidity near the surface”.

The clearing of rainforest in Latin America for coca plantations is one of the more obvious impacts of the drug trade on the environment. Growing demand for cocaine means more land is to be turned over to the crop. Since 2001, about 300,000 hectares of forest have been cleared for coca production. In Colombia alone, 143,000 hectares are under coca cultivation, much of it in designated nature reserves.

"In order to produce one hectare of coca, almost two hectares of tropical jungle are destroyed in Colombia," the country's president Iván Duque told the Financial Times at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Some cocaine users will talk about how much they care about the environment, he said, “but they don’t realise that when they consume [cocaine] they’re doing great damage to the environment”.

It also takes a lot of chemicals to make cocaine, which is done in makeshift laboratories hidden in the forests. The term "laboratory" is something of a misnomer, says UCC criminology lecturer Dr James Windle.

“In reality they’re a couple of barrels and a couple of microwaves with a tarpaulin over them in the middle of the jungle and when they’re finished it’s just a case of kicking them over and moving on somewhere else.”

Elsewhere, global demand for heroin has caused large-scale population movements by subsistence farmers seeking land to grow poppies. Ironically, the availability of a supposedly environmentally friendly technology – solar-powered well pumps – has made the problem worse.

Previously, poppy farmers in the former desert areas of Afghanistan such as Helmand and Kandahar used laundered diesel to operate the pumps required to draw water from deep underground for their crops. The fuel was expensive and tended to damage the machinery.

Now, due to the availability of solar powered pumps, "water is regarded as free", says David Mansfield, a socioeconomist and author of A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan.

This change has caused hundreds of thousands of people to relocate to these areas, putting meagre water sources under severe strain.

“These are areas which, 10 or 15 years ago, had no one living in them. Now instead of a few people pumping water using diesel and the water table dropping half a metre a year, we’re at two to three metres a year. And more and more people keep coming to the area.”

This will create “a massive problem” for the people there, he says. “When the water runs out they’ll have nothing. You’re talking about 1½ million people who will have to go and find a livelihood elsewhere.”

Legalisation

It is not just the poppy crop causing issues. Methamphetamine production, based on the ephedra plant, has also increased drastically in the country. Little research has taken place into the environmental impact of ephedra, but there are concerns that its cultivation could be contributing to droughts in the region, Mansfield says.

The drug trade has an outsized impact on the developing world, but its affects are also being felt in wealthy nations. This has been exacerbated by the legalisation of cannabis in parts of the US, where production of the drug now accounts for 1 per cent of total energy consumption, rising to 3 per cent in California.

Much of this has been driven by the power required for lighting, ventilation and air conditioning systems in indoor grow houses. After Colorado legalised cannabis, the Denver power grid saw a surge in electricity demand. According to a study published in Nature last March, the state's cannabis industry produces far more emissions than its coal mining industry. By one measure, the energy used to produce one joint would also produce 18 pints of beer.

Outdoor cultivation in warmer states such as California is little less harmful; a single cannabis plant requires 22 litres of water a day and, according to a 2016 estimate, the production of 1kg of cannabis emits up 4,600kg of carbon dioxide.

This is one area where Ireland could feel the impact. Illegal grow houses have become relatively common here and are often operated by victims of trafficking working in horrendous conditions. As well as the human rights abuses involved, such operations consume vast amounts of electricity.

Outsized electricity bills are often a reason they come to the notice of authorities in Europe (along with the lack of snow on their roofs in winter).

Compared to the power consumed by data centres, however, it is a drop in the ocean. But it is reasonable to assume the legalisation of the drug in Ireland would likely see associated power consumption increase drastically.

The trade in laboratory produced drugs, such as MDMA/ecstasy, can also be severely damaging to the environment due to the chemicals involved.

“One kilogram of MDMA produces 6-10kgs of chemical waste. For amphetamines, it is 20-30kgs,” says Windle.

‘Ethical’ producers

In countries like Ireland, the sale of such chemicals is highly regulated. But in others it is easy to divert substances from legal sources.

In Pakistan, for example, legitimate clothing companies may place a large order for chemicals used to manufacture jeans before diverting some of it to illegal drug production. It then invariably ends up polluting the environment.

“A tub of it goes out the back and gets used. Then once it’s used, what are you going to do with it? It ends up getting dumped in the sea or buried or just chucked into woods,” Windle adds.

There are reasonable arguments that legalising and regulating the drug trade would lessen its environmental impact. For example, some of the counter-narcotics methods used by South American governments have only exacerbated the deforestation problem.

Colombian authorities try to fight illegal coca production by spraying fields with powerful herbicides from the air. Not only does this damage neighbouring forests and farms, it also forces the cartels to clear new areas of forest to continue growing the crop.

“There is an argument that the policy of prohibition itself has led to a balloon effect by moving people in virgin areas,” says Mansfield.

Legalisation could also allow consumers to choose environmentally responsible drugs manufacturers. In the US there is a growing number of “ethical” cannabis producers, with names such as Raw Garden, which promise that their plants are grown sustainably with minimal harmful chemicals.

On the other hand, tobacco and alcohol, by far the most popular recreational drugs, have always been legal and cause as much damage to the environment as their illegal counterparts, if not more.

It takes 148 litres of water to produce one bottle of beer, while it has been estimated that shutting down the tobacco industry would be the equivalent of taking 16 million cars off the streets.