Word: arlacchi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pino Arlacchi is a man with an audacious mission: to stamp out all heroin and cocaine production worldwide in 10 years. Yeah, sure. But before you sell him short, take note of what he has already done since taking over the U.N. Drug Control Program last September. Responding to reports that opium production in Afghanistan had shot up 25%, he flew to Kandahar and personally persuaded the country's radical Taliban rulers to halt future planting in exchange for help in reconstructing a factory that will provide jobs for impoverished residents. A few weeks ago, the Taliban publicly burned...
...people will be paying attention this week when he acts as host of the U.N. General Assembly's Special Session on the World Drug Problem. President Clinton and other world leaders will gather in New York City to sign on to Arlacchi's ambitious, two-pronged program to cut off drug production at its source while reducing demand for narcotics in developed countries. His next step will be to persuade these leaders to cough up the $5 billion that he says it will cost...
...young sociology professor in the early 1980s, Arlacchi wrote a definitive book on how the Italian Mafia had transformed itself into a modern business. When the country's top Mafia fighter was gunned down in 1982, a badly shaken government asked Arlacchi to devise a plan to confiscate the organization's assets. After the Mob fought back with bombs that killed Italy's top two prosecutors, Arlacchi helped create a program to arrest hundreds of top Mafiosi and imprison them on a remote island off the coast. They failed in an attempt to kill him with a bomb planted...
...wants to offer farmers a viable substitute for the lucrative poppies and coca that produce heroin and cocaine. Close to 90% of the opium used to make heroin comes from tightly confined areas in Afghanistan and Burma. "Not only can we spot all the growing areas by satellite," says Arlacchi, "we can also see the alternative areas growers could move...
Similar substitutions have been tried in the past, but Arlacchi insists they were never systematically carried out. In Burma, Wa tribesmen stopped growing opium poppies altogether, but when an alternative-development program that had been promised was delayed two years, the tribesmen went back to poppies. Laos, which used to produce 3.5 tons of opium annually, recently switched to coffee, rice and chili farming under a U.N. pilot project. So far this year the Lao have cut opium production to a few hundred pounds. In Peru crop substitution has cut coca production 40%. "A million dollars," says Arlacchi, "can have...