The Golden Triangle region that joins Burma, Thailand, and Laos is one of the global centers of opiate and methamphetamine production. Opportunistic Chinese businessmen and leaders of various armed ...groups are largely responsible for the manufacture of these drugs. The region is defined by the apparently conflicting parallel strands of criminality and efforts at state building, a tension embodied by a group of individuals who are simultaneously local political leaders, drug entrepreneurs, and members of heavily armed militias.
Ko-lin Chin, a Chinese American criminologist who was born and raised in Burma, conducted five hundred face-to-face interviews with poppy growers, drug dealers, drug users, armed group leaders, law-enforcement authorities, and other key informants in Burma, Thailand, and China.The Golden Triangleprovides a lively portrait of a region in constant transition, a place where political development is intimately linked to the vagaries of the global market in illicit drugs.
Chin explains the nature of opium growing, heroin and methamphetamine production, drug sales, and drug use. He also shows how government officials who live in these areas view themselves not as drug kingpins, but as people who are carrying the responsibility for local economic development on their shoulders.
Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation is the first book to examine drug trafficking through Central America and the efforts of foreign and domestic law enforcement officials to counter it. Drawing on ...interviews, legal cases, and an array of Central American sources, Julie Bunck and Michael Fowler track the changing routes, methods, and networks involved, while comparing the evolution and consequences of the drug trade through Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama over a span of more than three decades. Bunck and Fowler argue that while certain similar factors have been present in each of the Central American states, the distinctions among these countries have been equally important in determining the speed with which extensive drug trafficking has taken hold, the manner in which it has evolved, the amounts of different drugs that have been transshipped, and the effectiveness of antidrug efforts.
Long before Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan became notorious for their contributions to the global drug traffic, Lebanon was a special target of U.S. drug agents for harboring the world's greatest ...single transit port in the international traffic in narcotics. In the words of one American official, "certain of the largest traffickers are so influential politically, and certain highly placed officials so deeply involved in the narcotic traffic, that one might well state that the Lebanese Government is in the narcotics business."Using previously secret government records, The Lebanese Connection uncovers for the first time the story of how Lebanon's economy and political system were corrupted by drug profits—and how, by financing its many ruthless militia, Lebanon's drug trade contributed to the country's greatest catastrophe, its fifteen-year civil war from 1975 to 1990. In so doing, this book sheds new light on the dangerous role of vast criminal enterprises in the collapse of states and the creation of war economies that thrive in the midst of civil conflicts.Taking a regional approach to the drug issue, Jonathan Marshall assesses the culpability of Syria, Israel, and of Palestinian factions and other groups that used Lebanon as their battleground. On the international level, he documents Lebanon's contribution to the hard drug problem of major consuming countries, from the days of the "French Connection" through the "Pizza Connection," as well as Lebanon's unrivaled place in the global hashish market.
In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Despite foreign policy efforts and attempts to combat supply lines, the United States has been for decades, and remains today, the largest single ...consumer market for illicit drugs on the planet.
In this volume, Bruce Bagley and Jonathan Rosen illustrate that the war on drugs has been ineffective at best and, at worst, has been highly detrimental to countries throughout the region. They present a clear picture of drug trafficking and its role in organized crime while discussing the major trends of the war on drugs in the twenty-first century, as well as its future.
With this comprehensive overview, Bagley and Rosen develop a framework for understanding the limits and liabilities in the U.S.-championed war on drugs throughout the Americas.
Trying to Make It is R. V.
Gundur's journey from the US-Mexico border to America's heartland,
from America's prisons to its streets, in search of the true story
of the drug trade and the people who ...participate in it.
The book begins in the Paso del Norte area, encompassing the sister
cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, which has been in the public
eye as calls for securing the border persist. From there, it moves
on to Phoenix, which was infamously associated with the drug trade
through a series of kidnappings. Finally, the book goes on to
Chicago, which has been a lightning rod of criticism for its gangs
and violence.
Gundur highlights the similarities and differences that exist in
the American drug trade within the three sites and how they relate
to current drug trade narratives in the US. At each stop, the
reader is transported to the city's historical and contemporary
contexts of the drug trade and introduced to the individuals who
have lived them. Drug retailers, street and prison gang members,
wholesalers, and the law enforcement personnel who try to stop them
offer readers a comprehensive look at how various illicit
enterprises work together to supply the drugs that American users
demand.
Most importantly, through a combination of macro- and microlevel
vantage points, and comparative analysis of three key sites in
illicit drug operations, the stories in Trying to Make It
remind us that the people involved in the drug trade, for the most
part, do not deserve vilification. Far from being a seemingly
uniform, widespread threat or an unlimited array of bogeymen and
women, they are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, just trying
to make it.
Policing methamphetamine Garriott, William Campbell
2011, 20110307, 2011-03-11, 2011-03-07
eBook, Book
In its steady march across the United States, methamphetamine has become, to quote former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the most dangerous drug in America. As a result, there has been a ...concerted effort at the local level to root out the methamphetamine problem by identifying the people at its source - those known or suspected to be involved with methamphetamine. Government-sponsored anti-methamphetamine legislation has enhanced these local efforts, formally and informally encouraging rural residents to identify meth offenders in their communities. Policing Methamphetamine shows what happens in everyday life - and to everyday life - when methamphetamine becomes an object of collective concern. Drawing on interviews with users, police officers, judges, and parents and friends of addicts in one West Virginia town, William Garriott finds that this overriding effort to confront the problem changed the character of the community as well as the role of law in creating and maintaining social order. Ultimately, this work addresses the impact of methamphetamine and, more generally, the war on drugs, on everyday life in the United States.
Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But inPoppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is ...not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state.
In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States.Poppies, Politics, and Powerbreaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.
From Pablo to Osama is a comparative study of Colombian drug-smuggling enterprises, terrorist networks (including al Qaeda), and the law enforcement agencies that seek to dismantle them. Drawing on a ...wealth of research materials, including interviews with former drug traffickers and other hard-to-reach informants, Michael Kenney explores how drug traffickers, terrorists, and government officials gather, analyze, and apply knowledge and experience. The analysis reveals that the resilience of the Colombian drug trade and Islamist extremism in wars on drugs and terrorism stems partly from the ability of illicit enterprises to change their activities in response to practical experience and technical information, store this knowledge in practices and procedures, and select and retain routines that produce satisfactory results. Traffickers and terrorists “learn,” building skills, improving practices, and becoming increasingly difficult for state authorities to eliminate. The book concludes by exploring theoretical and policy implications, suggesting that success in wars on drugs and terrorism depends less on fighting illicit networks with government intelligence and more on conquering competency traps—traps that compel policymakers to exploit militarized enforcement strategies repeatedly without questioning whether these programs are capable of producing the intended results.
Since the late 1970s, a new folk hero has risen to prominence in the U.S.–Mexico border region and beyond—the narcotrafficker. Celebrated in the narcocorrido, a current form of the traditional border ...song known as the corrido, narcotraffickers are often portrayed as larger-than-life “social bandits” who rise from poor or marginalized backgrounds to positions of power and wealth by operating outside the law and by living a life of excess, challenging authority (whether U.S. or Mexican), and flouting all risks, including death. This image, rooted in Mexican history, has been transformed and commodified by the music industry and by the drug trafficking industry itself into a potent and highly marketable product that has a broad appeal, particularly among those experiencing poverty and power disparities. At the same time, the transformation from folk hero to marketable product raises serious questions about characterizations of narcocorridos as “narratives of resistance.” This multilayered ethnography takes a wide-ranging look at the persona of the narcotrafficker and how it has been shaped by Mexican border culture, socioeconomic and power disparities, and the transnational music industry. Mark Edberg begins by analyzing how the narcocorrido emerged from and relates to the traditional corrido and its folk hero. Then, drawing upon interviews and participant-observation with corrido listening audiences in the border zone, as well as musicians and industry producers of narcocorridos, he elucidates how the persona of the narcotrafficker has been created, commodified, and enacted, and why this character resonates so strongly with people who are excluded from traditional power structures. Finally, he takes a look at the concept of the cultural persona itself and its role as both cultural representation and model for practice.
Over the course of the half century from 1865 to 1915, the British and Dutch delineated colonial spheres, in the process creating new frontiers. This book analyzes the development of these frontiers ...in Insular Southeast Asia as well as the accompanying smuggling activities of the opium traders, currency runners, and human traffickers who pierced such newly drawn borders with growing success.The book presents a history of the evolution of this 3000-km frontier, and then inquires into the smuggling of contraband: who smuggled and why, what routes were favored, and how effectively the British and Dutch were able to enforce their economic, moral, and political will. Examining the history of states and smugglers playing off one another within a hidden but powerful economy of forbidden cargoes, the book also offers new insights into the modern political economies of Southeast Asia.
