Nigerian drug lords in UK prisons, khat-chewing Somali pirates hijacking Western ships, crystal meth-smoking gangs controlling South Africa's streets, and narco-traffickers corrupting the state in Guinea-Bissau: these are some of the vivid images surrounding drugs in Africa which have alarmed policymakers, academics and the general public in recent years. In this revealing and original book, the authors weave these aspects into a provocative argument about Africa's role in the global trade and control of drugs. In doing so, they show how foreign-inspired policies have failed to help African drug users but have strengthened the role of corrupt and brutal law enforcement officers, who are tasked with halting the export of heroin and cocaine to European and American consumer markets. A vital book on an overlooked front of the so-called war on drugs.

Southeast Asia is one of the biggest marketplaces for illicit drugs. The international syndicates with their billion-dollar profits are similar to the Hydra of the old Greek mythology which grew two new heads if one was cut off. Hercules eventually killed the monster with the help of his nephew who cauterised the fresh wounds before new heads could emerge. This story describes quite well the challenging task for the political and police efforts to fight the narcotics industry which has a long history in Asia. From the early 1800s, the East India Company dumped Indian opium on China and ruined the economy of both countries. During the colonial heydays, Britain in Malaya and Burma, France in Indochina, and the Netherlands in today's Indonesia, financed big parts of their colonial budgets with opium. In the 20th century, heroin ruined countless lives in Southeast Asia and in the West.Today, synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamines, are produced in hidden laboratories in remote areas of the region and smuggled across the porous borders. Drug prevention programs and the harsh penalties in all ASEAN states have not reduced the drug trade and the consumption. On the contrary, both are growing.This book analyses the detrimental impact of the drug industry on the political economy and the social developments in Southeast Asia. Shortcomings and lasting damages can be traced in the political structures, in the rampant corruption, and the secretive links between customs, armies, police organisations, and organised crime.

At first glance, Gabriel Cardona is an exemplary American teenager: athletic, bright, handsome and charismatic. But his Texas town is poor and dangerous, and it isn't long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. Meanwhile, Mexican-born Detective Robert Garcia has worked hard all his life and is now struggling to raise his family in America. As violence spills over the border, Detective Garcia's pursuit of the Zetas puts him face to face with the urgent consequences of a war he sees as unwinnable. In Wolf Boys, Dan Slater takes readers on a harrowing, moving, and often brutal journey into the heart of the Mexican drug trade - from the Sierra Madre mountaintops to the smuggling ports of Veracruz, from cartel training camps and holiday parties to the dusty alleys of South Texas. Ultimately though, Wolf Boys is the intimate and vivid story of the 'lobos': teens turned into pawns for cartels. A non-fiction thriller, it reads with the emotional clarity of a great novel, yet offers its revelations through extraordinary reporting.

Cocaine Hoppers provides empirical evidence to explain the involvement of Nigerians in the global cocaine trade. Investigating the criminogenic environment created by the Nigerian 'state crisis,' Oboh traces the geographic, demographic, economic, historical, political, and cultural factors enhancing cocaine culture in Nigeria. Based on years of research, Oboh reveals this social network that relies on "reverse social capital" wherein wealth and power are achieved through illegal means solely to benefit the individual. This lively, theoretically grounded study examines the new trend of traffickers dominating the illicit cocaine trade through West Africa to destinations across the globe to provide an account of Nigerian involvement in international drug trafficking as it has never been divulged before. This book will be appreciated by criminologists, social scientists, policymakers, drug researchers and organized crime scholars. And eagerly be read by those interested in Nigeria, and problems of African immigrants, and in the international drug trafficking.

Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of kingpins. A clean-cut college boy who entered outlaw culture on a university trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He never looked back. Stratton became a member of the hippie mafia, travelling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favour of marijuana and hashish. With cameos by Whitey Bulger and Norman Mailer, Smuggler tells Stratton's adventure while centring on his last years in the business as he travels from New York to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to source and smuggle high-grade hash in the midst of civil war, from the Caribbean to the backwoods of Maine and from the Chelsea Hotel to the Plaza. As Stratton's fortunes rise and fall, he's pursued all the while by his nemesis, a philosophical DEA agent who respects him for his good business practices.

Challenging the U.S.-Led War on Drugs explores the cases that have resisted the U.S. pressure to adopt a militarized approach to fight against drug trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through a sweeping narrative history from the recovery of democracy in 1983 to the present, Cutrona applies international relations and comparative politics theories to understand Argentina's different trajectory vis-a-vis the rest of the region. The author demonstrates that in broad questions of vulnerability to U.S. pressure, external factors often play a secondary role in explaining either balancing/resistance or bandwagoning/acceptance of the U.S. security agenda in the Americas. Emphasizing the role of domestic-level politics, Cutrona identifies the subordination of the military to civilian oversight, the transition outcome, the system of check and balances, and the role of civil society actors such as social movements, epistemic communities, and norm entrepreneurs as Argentina's most relevant sources explaining defection from Washington's main dictates to combat drug trafficking.

This anthology explores the political nature of making order through policing activities in densely populated spaces across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Based on ethnographic research, the chapters analyze this complex with respect to marginalized young men in Haiti, community policing members and national politicians in Swaziland as well as other individual and collective actors engaged in policing and politics in Indonesia, Swaziland, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Bolivia, Haiti and Sierra Leone. What these contexts have in common is a plurality of order-making practices. Not one institution monopolizes the means of violence or a de facto sovereign position to do so. A number of interests are played out simultaneously, entailing re-negotiations over the very definition of what 'order' is. How and by whom a particular order is enforced is contested, at times violently so, and is therefore inherently political. In the existing literature on weak states, legal pluralism and policing in the Global South it is seldom made explicit that making order is a route to power and positions of political decision-making. It is this gap in the literature that this anthology fills, as it analyses the politics at stake in processes of order-making.

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of "simply" possessing five grams of crack-the equivalent of a few sugar packets-had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. In this highly original work, Dimitri A. Bogazianos draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America's reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America's War on Drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, Bogazianos shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the "rap game" and the "crack game." He argues that the symbolism of crack in rap's stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine-although a drug long in decline-has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the U.S. today.

Cops, Soldiers, and Diplomats is an exceptionally clear exposition of bureaucratic behavior amongst various agencies as each responded to the challenges of the War on Drugs. Chapter by chapter, author Tony Payan exposes the bureaucratic imperatives of the numerous agencies waging the drug war, uncovering some of the fundamental structural reasons why this war could not succeed within the United States: fragmentation, competition, duplication, jealousy, turf-wars, information hiding, and ultimate failure. Payan's work will be certain to find an audience with politicians and policy makers, students of sociology and criminology, and any one interested in the drug war.

Los Zetas represent a new generation of ruthless, sadistic pragmatists in Mexico and Central America who are impelling a tectonic shift among drug trafficking organizations in the Americas. Mexico's marines have taken down the cartel's top leaders; nevertheless, these capos and their desperados have forever altered how criminal business is conducted in the Western Hemisphere. This narrative brings an unprecedented level of detail in describing how Los Zetas became Mexico's most diabolical criminal organization before suffering severe losses.

In their heyday, Los Zetas controlled networks of American police, politicians, judges, and businessmen. The Mexican government is losing its "war on drugs," despite the military, technical, and intelligence resources provided by its northern neighbor. Subcontracted street gangs operate in hundreds of US cities, purchasing weapons, delivering product, executing targeted foes, and bribing the US Border Patrol. Despite crippling losses Los Zetas still dominate Nuevo Laredo, the major portal for legal and illegal bilateral commerce. They also work hand-in-glove with the underworld in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, as well as with gangs like the Maras Salvatruchas.

Winner of the 2014 Division of Women and Crime Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the American Society of Criminology Finalist for the 2013 C. Wright Mills Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Compelling interviews uncover why tough drug policies disproportionately impact women in the American prison system Since the 1980s, when the War on Drugs kicked into high gear and prison populations soared, the increase in women's rate of incarceration has steadily outpaced that of men. As a result, women's prisons in the US have suffered perhaps the most drastically from the overcrowding and recurrent budget crises that have plagued the penal system since harsher drugs laws came into effect. In Breaking Women, Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major US women's prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affected those incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women's detention centers has been deeply altered as a result. Through compelling interviews with prisoners and state personnel, McCorkel reveals that popular so-called "habilitation" drug treatment programs force women to accept a view of themselves as inherently damaged, aberrant addicts in order to secure an earlier release. These programs were created as a way to enact stricter punishments on female drug offenders while remaining sensitive to their perceived feminine needs for treatment, yet they instead work to enforce stereotypes of deviancy that ultimately humiliate and degrade the women. The prisoners are left feeling lost and alienated in the end, and many never truly address their addiction as the programs' organizers may have hoped. A fascinating and yet sobering study, Breaking Women foregrounds the gendered and racialized assumptions behind tough-on-crime policies while offering a vivid account of how the contemporary penal system impacts individual lives.

THE POLITICS OF NARCOTIC DRUGS: A Survey aims to explore the complexities of the drugs trade, and the political challenges and opportunities that exist for more effective approaches to the issues involved. The various sections of this volume provide the reader with an insight into the numerous debates, histories and experiences of drugs and the drugs trade and, most importantly, highlight the fact that the policy challenges currently faced by societies and governments do not configure in a simplistic way around a pro- or anti-legalization discourse. Contents include: Essay chapters, written by specialists in the field, which demonstrate the diversity, scale and nature of the drug `problem' and the importance of empirically informed, depoliticized responses. The first essays are international in focus, addressing the situation in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Colombia and Mexico before turning to the institutional anti-drugs context in the United Kingdom. Thereafter, the chapters are more theoretically oriented, with the authors exploring the prohibition model, the relationship between drugs and insurgency, and reflections on principles and approaches that might be considered when exploring alternatives to the status quo. A comprehensive cross-referenced A - Z Glossary of terms, organizations and issues with regard to drugs. Entries include caffeine, cocaine, Drug Enforcement Administration, mule, opium, UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) and volatile substances. Maps, charts and tables offering a wealth of information in graphic form. Maps include areas of cultivation of crops used for drugs, and statistics inform on production, seizures and prices of various narcotic drugs.

A high proportion of crimes committed in Britain are drugs-related, with many offenders having a documented history of drug use. However, the direct link between drugs and crime is often less clear than is supposed and this text attempts to achieve a better understanding of these and surrounding issues that have been marred by misunderstanding and a lack of consensus amongst experts. This text offers a major contribution to existing debates and provides an authoritative and much-needed overview of the range of issues associated with drugs-related crime. Coverage includes: a discussion on theoretical approaches to drugs and crime, an overview of the legal position on drugs and drug offenders, a critique of the aims and nature of treatment, an examination of trafficking and laundering, an analysis of the policing of drugs markets, a discussion about the legalisation debates. This new edition has been fully updated to include the latest data and recent developments in policy and particular attention is paid to changes in sentencing and treatment, as well as changes to practice in trafficking. An expanded chapter on women, drugs and crime now offers further coverage of drug-taking and prostitution. This is the only book in Britain which centres on the links between drugs and crime, and deals with the policy implications of that link. It is a comprehensive account of the various aspects of Government policy concerning drugs, and should be particularly useful to academics and students interested in or studying this aspect of criminology.

In 2017, late Tanzanian President John Magufuli publicly declared a war on drug users in Tanzania, an unprecedented change in policy in a country leading harm-reduction initiatives in East Africa. In the fall of 2018, Dane Degenstein travelled to Dar es Salaam to learn about these policy changes from those directly impacted, on the ground in Tanzania's largest city. The War on Drugs in Tanzania: Prohibition and Punishment examines the impact of crackdowns on people who use drugs and the impact of policy changes that curtail progressive and humane approaches to improving services for drug users. Degenstein explores how the Tanzanian government sidelined donors and NGOs, undertook a project that directly impinged on human rights, and produced narratives contributing to a global war on drugs. Using the case study of Tanzania, Degenstein draws out larger lessons on the continued international commitment to the war on drugs, how old ideologies that see drug users as criminals and failures continue to be produced, and how the war on drugs erases the perspectives of drug users themselves. Focusing on the experiences of drug activists themselves, the author argues for a radical rethinking of global drug policy.

Accompanying China's economic reform and open-door policy in 1978, illicit drug use emerged in the late 1980s, and gradually developed into a serious social problem. Heroin was the dominant illicit drug consumed in the new drug epidemic, and the number of female heroin users has increased rapidly in the country. While heroin use in China is soaring, little is known about women's heroin use in the context of China's rapidly changing society. Using intensive interviews with 131 female heroin users, this book explores the careers of female heroin users in China under changing social contexts in the reform era. It investigates the impacts of sociological and individual factors on women's heroin use in each developing stage of their drug use careers. It also examines the social consequences of women's heroin use by looking at connections between women's heroin use and criminality, and the change in women's social relations after heroin use. Lastly, the book analyzes and ascertains the impact of current narcotics control policies on women's drug use careers. This groundbreaking book has important policy implications for both China and the international society in the context of increasing global concern about women's substance abuse.

Drawing on newly available archival materials from the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter Presidential Libraries, James F. Goode offers a revolutionary analysis of the complex factors leading to the imposition and continuance of the 1975-1978 Turkish Arms Embargo. He demonstrates that, alone, the human rights issues surrounding the Republic of Turkey's invasion of Cyprus fail to explain the resulting US-Turkish estrangement. Instead, he contends, factors including deep-seated "Turkophobia," growing concern about a deadly heroin epidemic in the United States, and pro-Greek lobbies played important roles in heightening tensions and extending the embargo. This timely study will not only change how this period is understood, but it will also provide valuable insights into the future of international relations in the Middle East and beyond.

To penetrate the United States and Britain's markets with illicit drugs, Jamaican traffickers employed diverse and novel transportation methods and techniques in the post-1990 era that were more sophisticated than the trafficking of the 1980's. This transformation was particularly due to traffickers exploiting global processes to enhance their illegal drug industry. In response, Jamaica, America, and Britain have continuously established state-oriented actions aimed at curtailing the cross-border drug trade, thereby reflecting their resilience in combating this problem. This book explores past and present drug trafficking within the context of globalisation and examines state instituted responses to curb this problem. It demystifies the Jamaican, British, and American states' roles in the face of global security threats, such as drug trafficking, arguing that both developed and developing states pursue their national interests and maximize their goals through the exercise of state-power in controlling their territories and protecting their nationals from harm posed by traffickers.

In recent years, the south-western border of the United States has come under increasing pressure from the activities of Mexican narco-insurgents. These insurgents have developed rapidly from beginnings as nebulous gangs into networked cartels that have exposed the porosity of the border. These cartels declare no allegiance to any nation and are engaging in asymmetrical warfare against sovereign states throughout Mexico and in Central America. Within such states, de facto political control is shifting to the cartels in the 'areas of impunity' that have emerged. This book addresses these concerns and focuses on the criminal insurgencies being waged by the gangs and cartels. It is divided into sections on theory, Mexico, and the Americas and contains a number of introductory essays pertaining to this premier security threat to the United States and her allies in the region. Topics covered include criminal and spiritual insurgency, cartel weapons, corruption, feral cities, Los Zetas, politicized gangs, and threat analysis in Central America. This book will be a valuable resource to scholars in the fields of regional security, criminal justice and American Studies. It will be of great benefit to military and civil policymakers and practitioners in the areas of law enforcement and counternarcotics. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

This book examines different levels of narcotics control cooperation between the United States, Mexico and Colombia. Victor J. Hinojosa finds that Mexico is consistently held to a very different standard than Colombia and that the US often satisfies domestic political pressures to be tough on drugs by punishing Colombia while allowing Mexico much more freedom to pursue different strategies. He also explores the role of domestic terrorism and presidential reputation in Colombia for the US-Colombia pair and the role of competing issues in the US-Mexican bilateral agenda for that country pair, finding that congressional pressure and electoral tests exert the most impact on US behavior but that Mexican and Colombian behavior is best explained in other ways. Together, these findings suggest both the promise of integrating the study of international relations and comparative politics and important limitations of the theoretical framework.

For the majority of its history, the cultivation of cannabis did not stand out, at least compared to the cultivation of other illegal plants. Cannabis plantations, like coca bush or opium poppy plantations, were typically large in size, grown by local farmers in a handful of developing (producing) countries, processed and then exported to industrial (consuming) nations. While cocaine and heroin are still produced in a handful of developing countries, cannabis cultivation is increasingly universal. From Europe to the Americas and Oceania, import substitution in cannabis markets has been noticed in almost every developed country around the world, with a notable aversion for discrimination. Geographical, technological, cultural and economic factors help to explain why (indoor and outdoor) domestic cultivation is well established, and why the nature and extent of cultivation varies so dramatically across the western, developed nations. As we start the second decade of the 21st century, the new cannabis industry continues to fascinate both casual and academic observers of the drug scene. Researchers around the world have become increasingly interested in the phenomenon, aiming to describe, and potentially explain, the rapid switch from importation to domestic production in their own countries. In bringing together some of the world's leading experts on cannabis cultivation this book contains sixteen chapters that take an interdisciplinary look at global trends in cannabis cultivation. It will serve as an exemplar for wider discussions of key theories and concepts relating to the spread not just of cannabis cultivation, but also of illegal markets more generally, the actors that operate within these markets and the policies and practices that are employed in response to developments within these markets.

Accompanying China 's economic reform and open-door policy in 1978, illicit drug use emerged in the late 1980s, and gradually developed into a serious social problem. Heroin was the dominant illicit drug consumed in the new drug epidemic, and the number of female heroin users has increased rapidly in the country. While heroin use in China is soaring, little is known about women 's heroin use in the context of China 's rapidly changing society.

Using intensive interviews with 131 female heroin users, this book explores the careers of female heroin users in China under changing social contexts in the reform era. It investigates the impacts of sociological and individual factors on women 's heroin use in each developing stage of their drug use careers. It also examines the social consequences of women 's heroin use by looking at connections between women 's heroin use and criminality, and the change in women 's social relations after heroin use. Lastly, the book analyzes and ascertains the impact of current narcotics control policies on women 's drug use careers.

This groundbreaking book has important policy implications for both China and the international society in the context of increasing global concern about women 's substance abuse.

The book takes a hard hitting look at the drug wars taking place in Mexico between competing gangs, cartels, and mercenary factions; their insurgency against the Mexican state; the narco-violence and terrorism that is increasingly coming over the border into the United States, and its interrelationship with domestic prison and street gangs. Analysis and response strategies are provided by leading writers on 3GEN gang theory, counterterrorism, transnational organized crime, and homeland security.

Narcos Over the Border is divided into three sections: narco-opposing force (NARCO OPFOR) organization and technology use; patterns of violence and corruption and the illicit economy; and United States response strategies. The work also includes short introductory essays, a strategic threat overview, an afterword and selected references. Specific topics covered include: advanced weaponry, internet use, kidnappings and assassinations, torture, beheadings, and occultism, cartel and gang evolutionary patterns, drug trafficking, street taxation, corruption, and border firefights.

This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

This book is a detailed and close examination of the rave club drugs market as it took place in nightclubs, dance parties, pubs and bars and among friendship networks in London, in the mid to late 1990s. It focuses on the organizational features of drugs purchasing and selling and differentiates anonymous drugs trading in public nightclub settings, from selling among extended networks of friends and others. The stories of different people and friendship groups illustrate the varied drug selling roles and highlight the enterprise and entrepreneurship supporting their involvement.
Told from the perspective of author's own membership in this night-time leisure culture, and embracing the disciplines of urban sociology and cultural criminology, this book contributes to our knowledge of recreational drugs markets and night-time leisure cultures. It will be of interest to students and academics with interests in these fields, as well as the many other people whose lives became a part of this vibrant leisure scene.

Latin American cocaine trafficking organizations comprise an indigenous, globally competitive, multinational industry. Their business operations are deeply ingrained within the economic and political systems of countries throughout the region. While criminal enterprises operate in a more complex and uncertain setting than licit firms, their competitive success is determined in fundamentally similar ways. Models developed by geographers to explain the spatial behavior of licit multinational firms are profitably applied here to the operations of drug trafficking operations.

Providing a comprehensive analysis of drug misuse, dependence and the ways in which different parts of the world have responded to these problems, this volume examines aspects of the contemporary drug problem, the related debate and the way in which society is responding to it. Various controversial issues are covered, taking into account the way in which pressure groups would like to see changes in national and/or international drug control regimes. The book is drawn from extensive studies carried out by the UN over the last 15 years; each of the themes has been examined by a group of experts and lends itself to debate. Among the many topics discussed are: the legalization of drugs, prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, the macro and micro economy, supply and demand reduction and money laundering. The book will be a valuable resource for professionals and academics in law enforcement, health, social services, behavioural sciences, pharmacy and drug regulatory agencies.