The rush to label Jobe Vakariisi a “drug lord” says more about the system than the man.

Because real drug empires don’t run on lone masterminds. They run on layers—insulated, structured, and designed so the people at the top are never the ones taking the fall. That;s the Lebanese Muslim Alamedinne network for which Sam Amibne was the Fiji handler.

And the ones at the bottom? They’re replaceable.

Call them couriers. Call them fixers. Call them whatever sounds convenient. But let’s not pretend they’re the architects of international drug networks. They’re the ones exposed to risk, to arrest—and sometimes, as we’ve now seen, to something worse.

That doesn’t excuse criminal behaviour. But it does raise a harder question: are authorities actually dismantling networks, or just cycling through the most visible—and expendable—players?

Because it’s easy to arrest a man on the ground. It’s much harder to follow the money, the coordination, and the real decision-makers sitting well beyond reach.

And when the system stops at the lowest rung, it creates a false sense of success.

The public gets a headline. The system gets a win.

But the network? It barely notices.

If Fiji is serious about law and order, it needs to look past the convenient labels—and start asking who really benefits when the “big fish” keeps changing, but the operation never does.