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The Upperworld Side of Illicit Trafficking |
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by Petrus C. van Duyne
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Illicit Market Features
If we approach the organisation of crime of prohibited substances from the perspective of a criminal market phenomenon, we soon cross the beaten path of demand and supply of illicit commodities. Because the attention is directed at the ‘bad guys’ supplying the ‘forbidden fruits’, there is a bias to think also in terms of a supply side (criminal) economy. This is not a neo-conservative bias stemming from Reagan economic policy. Long before Reagan, illegal commodity trafficking used to be approached as a criminal supply phenomenon. From a narrow law enforcement perspective this is understandable: suppliers break the law and these should be apprehended. But does that do justice to a criminal commodity market? Let us look at the distinctive commercial and entrepreneurial features of such a market.
The Authorities as Market Determiners
In the first place we meet the most predominant market actor: the state. It is a platitude to say that it takes a ruling authority, be it a democratic or a dictatorial one, to declare certain customers’ conduct undesirable and prohibit the relevant commodities. This results in a shift from a legal to ‘forbidden fruits’ market, as is the case with the drugs market, the gambling or the sex market, just to name a few. The reasons for this penal law intervention may be ethical, religious, related to public health or a mixture.
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Consequences of the War on Drugs for Transit Countries: The Jamaican Experience |
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by Carl Williams
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The War on Drugs of the last two decades has been fought on many fronts. Spanning a period of intense national and transnational drug enforcement efforts, the war was spurred by President Reagan’s war-like pronouncements in 1986, “My generation will remember how America swung into action when we were attacked in World War II. The war was not just fought by the fellows flying the planes or driving the tanks…[but also] at home by a mobilized nation… Well, now we’re in another war for our freedom, and it’s time for all of us to pull together again” (Alexander, 1990). Despite many previous war-like efforts to control the consumption and trade of illicit substances in North America prior to the Reagan years,1 the current war on drugs marks an unprecedented attempt both to pursue a drug-free society within the United States and to globalize the reach of domestic policies. Bewley-Taylor (1999) opines that illegal drugs have partially filled the vacuum created by the fall of Soviet communism, apparently providing America with an external adversary worthy of another continuous state of war. This opinion, though undoubtedly diminished by the preeminence of the current war on terror, nonetheless underscores the significance of the anti-drug campaign in America’s foreign and domestic policy.
Steeped in prohibitionist doctrine and with a predominant focus on supply reduction as the primary strategy for winning the battle against illegal drugs, the war on drugs has been widely acclaimed as unsuccessful. Pointing to the relative stability of both street prices and the demand for drugs as an indication of failed drug policy, critics of the drug war attribute its failure to a lack of attention to demand reduction, while others such as Reiman (2007) have questioned the ethics of drug policies that have led to an unprecedented growth in the prison population of the United States. Other scholars, specifically Youngers (2004: 362), acknowledge that “drug abuse and its related violence in the United States is home-grown and hence must be primarily addressed domestically,” and denounce U.S. policy for its exportation of the war on drugs, its globalization of domestic problems, and its misconceived solutions that have been foisted onto other countries.
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Trafficking 
