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British Home Office Minister Bob Ainsworth warned last month that his country is on the verge of a national crack cocaine epidemic that could lead to unprecedented surges in gun-related crimes and violent robberies. British law enforcement so far has failed to make a dent in the crack cocaine trafficking industry -- controlled mainly by Jamaican gangsters commonly called Yardies -- despite two years of redoubled counter-narcotics efforts in key trafficking centers like London, Bristol and Liverpool.

According to U.S. and Jamaican law enforcement sources, who also are familiar with Jamaican gangs (called "posses") in the United States, this police ineffectiveness is due mainly to a lack of personnel, intelligence resources and institutional experience in battling criminals as casually violent as the Yardies tend to be. Most British police still carry out their duties unarmed, but Yardies traditionally have used Uzis and Ingram MAC-10 machine guns against each other and anyone else who gets in their way -- including police officers.

Moreover, the crack cocaine problem is growing across Britain just as the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is preparing to implement the broadest reform of British drug laws in more than 30 years. The government is preparing to ease marijuana laws and make rules more flexible for prescribing medicinal heroin -- or diamorphine -- to addicts. But Blair has yet to unveil a strategy for containing the spread of crack cocaine.

As this epidemic continues in the future, more gun-related Yardie gang violence likely will spring up in Britain as well, forcing British police to start abandoning completely their cherished tradition of enforcing the law unarmed.

Jamaican and British police intelligence officials estimate that at least 30 major Yardie gangs are operating in Britain currently. They are running more than 200 pounds of cocaine per week on commercial air flights from Kingston and Montego Bay in Jamaica to Heathrow and Gatwick airports in London.

Also, Jamaican police chief Carl Williams says he believes that at least 500 known criminals who are wanted in his country for murder, drug trafficking and other crimes are trafficking crack cocaine in Britain. However, the actual number of Yardie drug traffickers in Britain could be significantly higher, given that more than 15,000 Jamaicans simply vanished after arriving in the country last year, according to British government figures cited recently by the Yorkshire Evening Post.

Yardie gangs have been operating in Britain since the 1970s, mainly in London, but in recent years they also have been branching out across Wales and Scotland, where crack cocaine consumption has multiplied by more than 200 percent since 1997, according to Scottish police sources. Moreover, since the al Qaeda terrorist attacks last September, many of Britain’s 43 local police forces have noticed a rapid surge in crack cocaine and heroin trafficking by Yardie gangs.

British police intelligence officials theorize that two factors are behind the trafficking trend. For one, London is saturated with Yardie gangs, and the increasingly crowded and violent competition for the same crack cocaine market is compelling the Yardies to seek new markets in other cities where established traditional crime gangs can be intimidated or killed off easily.

At the same time, the U.S. war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan has disrupted traditional Southwest Asian heroin supply pipelines, and the Yardies are using their Colombian cocaine connections to push long-established Southwest Asian drug gangs in London out of the market by supplying heroin and crack cocaine simultaneously to British addicts.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens recently told London’s Evening Standard newspaper that the country’s customs and police authorities believed a "high proportion" of the crack cocaine sold in Britain was being manufactured locally from powdered cocaine imported from Jamaica.

Yardie gangs are believed to be directly responsible for about 15 percent of the cocaine imported to Britain annually. Nearly all of this is smuggled on direct commercial air flights from Jamaica to London, mainly by young, poor Jamaican women. British and Jamaican police intelligence sources estimate that more than 200 such "mules," as these women are called in the trade, fly into Heathrow and Gatwick airports every week.

Each woman carries up to 150 packets of cocaine weighing up to half a kilogram collectively. Less than 10 percent are ever detected, despite the growing use of sophisticated drug-detection technologies and further bilateral cooperation between British and Jamaican law enforcement agencies.

In early May British police joined customs officials in a special one-time operation intended to demonstrate to skeptical politicians and human rights groups that law enforcement claims about Jamaican flights referred to as "Air Cocaine" were not exaggerated. Police officers from Bristol, London, West Midlands, Leeds and Nottingham converged on Heathrow Airport to strip search all of the passengers on two Air Jamaica flights arriving at nearly the same time from Kingston and Montego Bay.

In all, 27 of the 440 arriving passengers were found to be carrying cocaine, while another 10 were arrested on drug-smuggling charges before they boarded the flights in Jamaica. Also, 42 of the passengers (nearly 10 percent) were denied entry into Britain because about half were identified as known criminal gunmen, and the others were carrying passports under false identities.

The exercise made the point that direct commercial air flights between Jamaica and Britain are a vital link in the cocaine and heroin supply chain that is controlled directly by the Yardie gangs. In the minds of most senior British law enforcement officers, it also validated their call on the government to create a special visa program administrated in Kingston for Jamaicans wishing to travel to Britain.

However, fearing that it would be charged with racism and discrimination at home and abroad, the Blair government has flatly rejected this idea, even though Jamaican law enforcement sources agree that an effectively administrated visa program likely would cut down drastically on smuggling by young impoverished Jamaican women.

Jamaican police officers instead were brought to Britain last April for the first time under a bilateral arrangement to infiltrate the Yardie gangs. But law enforcement’s experience in battling gangs in Jamaica over the past several decades suggests that British police will have only limited success containing the crack cocaine and heroin trade.

The upsurge in drug-related Yardie violence in London and other major British cities likely will continue to confront the government and police forces in the coming months, and will force the deployment of special heavily armed police tactical units to contain young Jamaican gunmen who kill as casually as they breathe.