The Walrus and the Drug Trade
IT WOULD be hard to think of two big mammals more different than the walrus and the elephant. But the massive, lethargic seals lounging on the ice floes of the Bering Sea have a problem in common with the lordly roamers of the African veld: Their most precious possession often means their untimely death. They both have tusks.
Perhaps even more than the elephant, the walrus lives by its tusks. When it dives to the seafloor to look for food, it skids along on its tusks as with its lips it sucks up clams and oysters. When it wants to clamber up onto an ice floe to bask in the sun, it uses its tusks as grappling hooks to haul its 2,000- to 3,000-pound [900 to 1,400 kg] bulk out of the water. A mother walrus will use her tusks to fight to the death any predator that threatens her young.
But sadly for the walrus, its tusks are also valued by humans. Man has an endless thirst for ivory. And a 10- or 12-foot-long [3-4 m] walrus lazing in the arctic sun is not a difficult target for a man with a semiautomatic rifle. So it is not uncommon for some Alaskans to prowl the Bering Sea in small boats, slaughter the beasts wherever they come upon them, and return home with a boatload of tusked heads, hacked off by chain saw.
Thus far the tale sounds all too familiar, but it has a bizarre twist this time: drugs. Young Alaskan Eskimo, it seems, are using walrus tusks to finance their drug addiction. And as Newsweek magazine notes: “The rate of exchange is appallingly cheap.” A special agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told the magazine that black-market dealers can buy a pair of tusks—worth as much as $800—for six marijuana cigarettes.
The law offers the hunters more protection than the hunted. It allows Alaskan natives to hunt the walrus for the food it provides them. Of course, they may keep the tusks as a by-product to use for native craftwork. The law sounds fair, but it is a haven for the unscrupulous. Some nonnative ivory traders have moved in with Eskimo women just so that they can claim that their hoard of tusks is earmarked for native crafts.
As the slaughter continues, concern is growing. Those who hunt walrus legally and those who actually use the ivory for craftwork feel their livelihood threatened. Older Eskimo find the burgeoning plague of drug addiction among their youths appalling. And the walrus? There are yet some 250,000 of them in the Pacific, so they are not considered endangered. But their headless carcasses drift ashore by the hundreds. So many have washed up on Siberian shores that the Soviet Union has urged the United States to stop the slaughter. But how long will the walrus be safe from extermination when its tusks mean money for the greedy and drugs for the dissolute?
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H. Armstrong Roberts