The U.S.-Mexico border is the busiest in the world, the longest and most dramatic meeting point of a rich and poor country, and the site of intense confrontation between law enforcement and law evasion. Border control has changed in recent years from a low-maintenance and politically marginal activity to an intensive campaign focusing on drugs and migrant labor. Yet the unprecedented buildup of border policing has taken place in an era otherwise defined by the opening of the border, most notably through NAFTA. This contrast creates a borderless economy with a barricaded border.

In the updated and expanded second edition of his essential book on policing the U.S.-Mexico border, Peter Andreas places the continued sharp escalation of border policing in the context of a transformed post-September 11 security environment. As Andreas demonstrates, in some ways it is still the same old border game but more difficult to manage, with more players, played out on a bigger stage, and with higher stakes and collateral damage.

A collection of chilling stories of murders from Mexico, one of the world's most prolific hunting grounds for serial killers. 'If I was a serial killer looking for new victims, I'd head over the border to Mexico because life is cheap there and the police have got so much other sh*t to investigate, they don't bother with random killings.' - A former FBI agent For decades, America has been considered to be the natural home of serial killers. Infamous names like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer are internationally known and feared, and rightly so. But what if, just south of the border, there was a far more active network of serial killers? What if the perfect storm of crime, fuelled by this nation's deadly narco wars, has turned Mexico into an ideal hunting ground for many of the most bizarre and blood thirsty serial killers the world has ever seen? Serial Killers of Mexico delves into this criminal underbelly to tell the stories of the psychopathic loners, professional narco assassins and the overwhelmed law enforcement trying desperately to hunt them down.

Canada is actively involved through various agencies in the domestic affairs of countries in the Global South. Over time, these practices - rationalized as a form of humanitarian assistance - have become increasingly focused on enhancing regimes of surveillance, policing, prisons, border control, and security governance. Drawing on an array of previously classified materials and interviews with security experts, Security Aid presents a critical analysis of the securitization of humanitarian aid. Jeffrey Monaghan demonstrates that, while Canadian humanitarian assistance may be framed around altruistic ideals, these ideals are subordinate to two overlapping objectives: the advancement of Canada's strategic interests and the development of security states in the "underdeveloped" world. Through case studies of the major aid programs in Haiti, Libya, and Southeast Asia, Security Aid provides a comprehensive analysis and reinterpretation of Canada's foreign policy agenda and its role in global affairs.

Cocaine is the world's most notorious narcotic. It underpins a vast, multi-billion pound underworld with a dark and deadly side. But who really are the shadowy people behind this chilling network? The coca farmers, the jungle sweat-shop workers, the smugglers, the suppliers, and, ultimately, the dealers who provide for the world's hundreds of millions of users. Cocaine Confidential goes inside the lives of all these characters to reveal their stories for the first time. Along the way you'll meet hitmen, pimps, desperate former international footballers, coke barons, mules, hardened traffickers and corrupt cops as the truth is unravelled in a roller coaster ride through this secret world.

The No 1 Bestseller! 'A triumph' Nicola Tallant, Sunday World Crime World podcast 'An incredible catalogue of mayhem ... amazing' Pat Kenny, Newstalk 'Riveting' Irish Times Meet the Wilsons - the deadliest family in crime Brothers Eric, Keith and John Wilson, their cousin Alan, and nephew Luke shared a trade - assassination. Working for Ireland's criminal gangs they brought bloodshed and chaos to the streets. The Wilsons were not choosy about their targets. Hutches, Real IRA chiefs or random opponents from pub rows - they were all the same to them. Nor were they picky about motives - as long as the price was right, they asked no questions. The Hitmen is the shocking story of how a family cornered the market in intimidation and vengeance. It details the terrible cost in human suffering, particularly the death of an innocent teenage girl, Mariaora Rostas, when she randomly crossed their path. And it reveals how, one by one, each of the Wilsons was put out of business. The Hitmen draws on exclusive access to wire taps, case files and interviews with sources close to the gang who have never spoken before. No 1 bestselling authors Stephen Breen and Owen Conlon have written an extraordinary account of a family business like no other.

This engaging and thoroughly updated text provides a cross-national perspective on the use and regulation of both legal and illegal drugs. It examines and critiques drug policies in the United States and abroad in terms of their scope, goals, and effectiveness. Authors Clayton J. Mosher and Scott Akins also discuss the physiological, psychological, and behavioral effects of legal and illicit drugs; the patterns and correlates of use; theories of the causes of drug use; and the policies that govern that usage. Features and Benefits Thoroughly reviews use of and regulation policies of both illegal and legal drugs, including the use of energy drinks and muscle enhancers like steroids and human growth hormones. Very up to date statistics and discussions of emerging trends and policies. Provides more coverage of drug policy issues than comparable books with particular attention to contrasting policies in countries around the world. Coverage of drug "epidemics" for new legal and illegal drugs not found in other books on drugs.

A global workforce. Billions in sales. But, unlike Tesco or BP, few have heard of it. The Cartel is Britain's biggest drugs organisation, a shadowy network stretching from the freezing, fog-banks of the Mersey to the glittering marinas of Marbella, from the coffee shops of Amsterdam to the trading floors of Canary Wharf. Run by godfathers as rich as Branson but kept in line by a new generation of teenage killers. Here is the inside story.

Recent debate around the potential decriminalization of marijuana, along with a growing perception that illicit drug use is on the rise, has brought the role of the state in controlling intoxication to the forefront of public discussion. Until now, however, there has been little scholarly consideration of the legal and social regulation of drug use in Canada. In The Real Dope, Edgar-Andre Montigny brings together leading scholars from a diverse range of fields--including history, law, political science, criminology, and psychology--to examine the relationship between moral judgment and legal regulation.Highlights of this collection include rare glimpses into how LSD, cocaine, and ecstasy have historically been treated by authority figures. Other topics explored range from anti-smoking campaigns and addiction treatment to the relationship between ethnicity and liquor control. Readers will find intriguing links across arguments and disciplines, providing a much-needed foundation for meaningful discussion.

Exploring the experiences of both male clients and female sex workers, China's Commercial Sexscapes expands upon the complex dynamics of sex worker and client relationships, and places them within the wider implications of expanding globalization and capitalism. The book is based in large part upon interviews with sex workers and their clients the author conducted while undercover as a bartender in Dongguan, an important industrial city in Guangdong province and an explicit, complicated, and multidimensional setting for study. In the wake of the financial crisis, the purchasing of sex by single, young-adult males has become an increasingly socially acceptable way for men to perform and experience heteronormative masculinity. Investigating human rights, social policy, and the criminal justice system in China, this book applies the concept of "edgework" to the commercial sex industry in Dongguan to study how men and women interact within the changing global economy.

The relationship between drugs and today s wars has grown more noticeable since the end of the Cold War and will likely gather strength in this era of increased globalization. Many violent groups and governments have recently turned to illicit narcotics in their entrepreneurial quests to stay viable in the post Cold War world. It is no coincidence that many of the most violent and ongoing conflicts, from the Balkans to the Hindu Kush, from the Andes to the Golden Triangle, occur in areas of widespread drug production and well-traveled distribution routes.Interdisciplinary in its approach, "Drugs and Contemporary Warfare" investigates the convergence of drugs and modern warfare, the violent actors involved in the drug trade, the drugs they produce and distribute, and how these drugs enter into battlefield conflicts and give rise to combat narcosis. Paul Rexton Kan then examines counternarcotics operations and suggests solutions to curb the drug trade s effects on contemporary conflict. He offers several broad strategies that refine assessments, policies, and operations to promote improvement in social, economic, and political conditions. The hope is that these strategies will help citizens create sustainable societies and robust governments in war-afflicted countries struggling under the drug trade s shadow. In a world searching for peace, the answer may not solely be on the battlefield but also on the front line against illegal narcotics. With a foreword by Moises Naim, editor in chief of "Foreign Policy" magazine and the author of "Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy."

Miami, December 31, 1979. Lock your doors. Watch your backs. Raise your glasses. Miami is about to blow, in a fiery explosion of cocaine, blood, bullets, torched cars, cash, immigrants, hustlers, dopers, informants, corruption, body bags and inner tubes. In the seventies, coke hit Miami with the full force of a hurricane, and no place attracted dealers and dopers like Coconut Grove's Mutiny at Sailboat Bay. Hollywood royalty, rock stars, and models flocked to the hotel's club to order bottle after bottle of Dom and to snort lines alongside narcos, hit men, and gunrunners, all while marathon orgies burned upstairs in elaborate fantasy suites. Amid the boatloads of powder and cash reigned the new kings of Miami: three waves of Cuban immigrants vying to dominate the trafficking of one of the most lucrative commodities ever known to man. But as the kilos-and bodies-began to pile up, the Mutiny became target number one for law enforcement. Based on exclusive interviews and never-before-seen documents, Hotel Scarface is a portrait of a city high on excess and greed, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism offering an unprecedented view of the rise and fall of cocaine-and the Mutiny-in Miami.

TO KNOW THE TRUE STORY BEHIND A WAR, ASK THE PEOPLE WHO FOUGHT IT 'An observation van is running surveillance on a high-level Bradford gangster. Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off - with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal' The Drug Wars have been fought on British streets for decades, bringing destruction, corruption and violence in their wake. Yet it is a story that remains fundamentally untold. Until now. In this groundbreaking book, former undercover police officer Neil Woods, who risked his life infiltrating some of the UK's most vicious gangs, pieces together the complex and terrifying reality of the drug war in Britain. Calling upon gripping first-hand accounts from those on both sides of the battle, Drug Wars is told by those who are fighting it.

In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime's collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war showed Foreign Policy's index of failed states to be deeply flawed-FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong, but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than Sweden. Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his launching point Charles Tilly's famous dictum that 'war made the state, and the state made war,' Arjun Chowdhury argues that the problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic power with stability. But major wars are the true source of stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival. Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable: there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India's districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the majority of states in the world-about two thirds-are weak states. Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international security requires a normative shift : the language of weakness and failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions. Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war, which is an extremely costly approach-in terms of human lives and capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak. Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink foundational concepts of international politics like political stability and state failure.

Howard Marks is the most famous drug smuggler of his age, and a hero to a generation. On his release from one of America's toughest prisons, Howard made a promise to himself to go straight. No more drugs, no more smuggling, no more fake passports. He would retire to a quiet life with his family in the Balearic Islands of Spain. It didn't quite work out that way. This was the mid-nineties, the height of the ecstasy and clubbing boom, and Ibiza was at the very centre of the vortex for the 'E generation'. Pills had taken the place of marijuana, Paul Oakenfold had replaced The Rolling Stones as the music of the masses, but some people are just born for life on the other side of the law. It wasn't long before Howard found himself trying pure ecstasy and rubbing shoulders with some of the king-pins of the pill trade. These included some of Britain's most notorious gangsters, who were laundering millions of pounds of gold stolen from the legendary Brink's-Mat bullion raid. As Britons descended on Ibiza ahead of one of the greatest summers of the nineties, Howard was preparing for his most outrageous operation yet. Incredibly funny, moving and scabrous, Howard Marks' Mr Smiley follows a journey to the heartland of the clubbing and British crime scene. It is also a fitting last word from one of Britain's best loved bad boys.

For millions of people across the world, lighting up a joint is no more controversial than having a cup of tea. But in Hash Wensley Clarkson explores the dark and sinister side of this multi-billion pound business: one fuelled by a brutal underworld network of dealers, drug barons, bent cops and even terrorists. Sex, intimidation, bribery and murder are all employed in a quest for vast profits. Travelling from the lawless Rif mountains in Morocco to darkened warehouses in Spain, protected by heavily armed gangsters, this is a revelatory roller-coaster ride through the secret world of Hash.

Methamphetamine: A Love Story presents an insider's view of the world of methamphetamine based on the life stories of thirty-three adults formerly immersed in using, dealing, and manufacturing meth in rural Oklahoma. Using a respectful tone towards her subjects, Shukla illuminates their often decades-long love affair with the drug, the attractions of the lifestyle, the eventual unsustainability of it, and the challenges of exiting the life. These personal stories reveal how and why people with limited economic means and inadequate resources become entrapped in the drug epidemic, while challenging longstanding societal views about addiction, drugs, drug policy, and public health.

'A thriller-like tale ... [Mazur] is a good story-teller, with a flair for details that brings the criminal and their world to life' Daily Mail 'Bob Mazur delivers again ... he artfully takes the reader through the harrowing account of life as an undercover cop embedded in the drug cartels' BRYAN CRANSTON 'A book you can't put down, nor will you' JOSEPH PISTONE, aka Donnie Brasco From the bestselling author who inspired Bryan Cranston's The Infiltrator. Three years after undercover agent Robert Mazur infiltrated Pablo Escobar's Medellin drug cartel, he re-emerged, a half-million-dollar bounty still on his head, with a new identity for a risky new sting. Deployed to Panama, he worked, travelled, partied and washed millions with Central America's criminal elite. Partnered with a DEA task force agent, Mazur slipped effortlessly into Colombia's notorious Cali drug cartel. But as his underworld reputation skyrocketed, the operation started going dangerously off the rails. Robert Mazur's riveting true story exposes the corruption at the heart of one of the most explosive undercover missions of his career. Refusing to acknowledge the danger, Mazur was obsessed with seeing the mission through to its treacherous end: expose the Cali cartel, find out who betrayed him, and escape with his life. This is his true story.

In July 2017, Chloe Ayling, a 20-year-old model from South London, was drugged and kidnapped in Milan, Italy. She was there for a photo shoot, but ended up abducted, bundled into the boot of a car and driven to a remote farmhouse where she was held captive for six days. She was told she was being auctioned on the Dark Web as a sex slave, and that if she tried to escape, she'd be killed instantly by agents of the Black Death gang. Chloe was eventually set free by twisted fantasist Lukasz Herba, and her story became a tabloid obsession and a national conversation. On being freed, Chloe's version of events - along with some of the stranger circumstances of her kidnapping - drove the press into a frenzy. What Chloe has gone through is not trial by jury, but trial by media. One year on, her kidnapper, Lukasz Herba, has been found guilty and sentenced to sixteen years and nine months in jail, and Chloe is finally vindicated and able to tell the full story of her terrifying ordeal.

The gritty prison memoir of Michaella McCollum, one half of the infamous 'Peru Two', imprisoned in a Peruvian jail for attempting to smuggle 11kg of cocaine from Peru to Madrid in August 2013.

She was just a regular girl, spending the summer working at a bar in Ibiza, until she was approached by a man who asked her if she'd like to make some quick, easy money...and it would change her life forever. This is the truth of her time in prison, told through her own diaries and letters to her mother, family and friends, recounting tales of vicious guards, psychotic inmates and horrendous prison conditions.

A brilliantly affecting tale of a naïve young girl who starts out in the Ibiza party scene and comes of age in the dark heart of Peru, before finally emerging into the sun a stronger, more confident, mature young woman.

Legal Highs are without doubt the biggest drug scourge to blight the world since recreational drugs first hit the streets more than 100 years ago. Their growing menace opens up a new front in the drug war, shifting the battle line from the Colombian jungles, Moroccan valleys, Afghan hills and the Winnebagos of New Mexico to especially constructed laboratories on the outskirts of Shanghai and other cities across the globe. But who are the shadowy characters behind the extravagant new drugs such as 'bath salts' and 'Miaow Miaow'? The scientists, the rogue boffins, the factory sweat-shop workers, the smugglers, the suppliers, and, ultimately, the dealers who sell tens of millions of packets of these substances every week? Why are so many people from all walks of life now consuming Legal Highs in such large quantities? This book will go inside the lives of all these people to reveal for the first time the true stories behind the emergence of the most deadly narcotics the world has ever seen.

This history of US-led international drug control provides new perspectives on the economic, ideological, and political foundations of a Cold War American empire. US officials assumed the helm of international drug control after World War II at a moment of unprecedented geopolitical influence embodied in the growing economic clout of its pharmaceutical industry.
"We Sell Drugs" is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products--Coca-Cola and cocaine--this book situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality.
The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society's habits and daily lives.
In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, "We Sell Drugs" insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.

In July 1920, when the first Dangerous Drugs Act was passed, the UK drug scene was limited to small groups of Soho night people smoking opium and sniffing coke, and some middle- and upper-class people (mainly women) around the country quietly getting private morphine prescriptions from their GP. Now, exactly 100 years on, we have hundreds of thousands of people using a whole smorgasbord of different drugs. How did that happen? The nineteenth century saw scientific developments whose unintended consequences laid the foundations for the modern explosion of recreational and chronic drug use, which has in turn sparked a worldwide effort to stop it. At first encouraged by the commercial opportunities afforded by widespread 'cures' - many consisting of little more than heroin or cocaine - by the twentieth century a moral crusade had gathered force to curb this new social ill. In truth, although the dangers of drug use were very real, the origins of the war against drugs stemmed from wider fears in society. In this new book, the culmination of a lifetime of research and writing on the topic, Harry Shapiro isolates the different elements behind the war on drugs to present an issue reaching boiling point. Using a range of interviews, documentation, private papers, government archives and studies from the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, Shapiro synthesises a tale of crime, money, politics and exploitation bigger than any country.

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government's response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Los Zetas Inc. asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence of the brutal Zetas criminal organization in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas. Going beyond previous studies of the group as a drug trafficking organization, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera builds a convincing case that the Zetas and similar organizations effectively constitute transnational corporations with business practices that include the trafficking of crude oil, natural gas, and gasoline; migrant and weapons smuggling; kidnapping for ransom; and video and music piracy. Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, Los Zetas Inc. proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Correa-Cabrera delineates the Zetas establishment, structure, and forms of operation, along with the reactions to this new model of criminality by the state and other lawbreaking, foreign, and corporate actors. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed "Academi" and now a Constellis company). Asserting that the elevated level of violence between the Zetas and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies the beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

Galax, a small Virginia town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was one of the first places that Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, and Johannes Huessy visited for their study of the social dynamics of methamphetamine markets--and what they found changed everything. They had begun by thinking of methamphetamine markets as primarily small-scale mom-and-pop businesses operated by individual cooks who served local users--generally stymied by ever more strenuous laws. But what they found was a thriving and complex transnational industry. And this reality was repeated in towns and cities across America, where the methamphetamine market was creating jobs and serving as a focus for daily lives and social experience.
"The Methamphetamine Industry in America" describes the reality that the methamphetamine industry is a social phenomenon connecting local, national, and international communities and markets. The book details the results of a groundbreaking three-stage study, part of a joint initiative of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Justice, in which police agencies across the United States were surveyed and their responses used to identify likely areas of study. The authors then visited these areas to observe and interview local participants, from users and dealers to law enforcement officers and clinical treatment workers.Through the eyes and words of these participants, the book tells the story of the evolution of methamphetamine markets in the United States over the past several years, given changes in public policies and practices and changing public opinion about methamphetamine. The authors look closely at how the markets are part of a larger industry, how they are socially organized, and how they operate. They also consider the relationships among the people involved and those around them, and the national, regional, and local culture of the markets. Their work demonstrates the importance of understanding the business of methamphetamine--and by extension other drugs in society--through a lens that focuses on social behavior, social relationships, and the cultural elements that shape the organization and operation of this illicit but effective industry.

The No 1 Bestseller 'A fascinating read' Sean O'Rourke, RTE Radio One 'Fat' Freddie Thompson first appeared in court in 1997. He was sixteen and already aspiring to be a major crime boss. Over the next twenty years his criminal career would be marked by mayhem, brutality and murder. In 2000 a row over a failed drugs deal ignited a murderous feud in Dublin's south inner city. The Crumlin-Drimnagh feud's first victim was a friend of Thompson's and he led his Crumlin crew in a series of tit-for-tat killings. Sixteen young men would lose their lives over the next fifteen years. Meanwhile, childhood friend, Daniel Kinahan, had become a senior figure in his father Christy Kinahan's international crime cartel. Working with the Kinahan Cartel Thompson launched himself as a drugs dealer in Dublin. When another deadly feud broke out in 2016 - between the powerful Kinahans and veteran Dublin criminal, Gerry 'The Monk ' Hutch - Thompson was ready to get his hands dirty. But Thompson's loyalty would be his undoing. In August 2018 he was convicted of murder and jailed. Fat Freddie is a gripping account of the rise and fall of Freddie Thompson. Award-winning crime journalist, Stephen Breen, co-author of the No 1 bestselling The Cartel, has written the definitive portrait of a notorious Dublin gangster, a shocking story of double-crossing, vengeance and murder.