Illicit Drugs

By most estimates, the traffic in illicit drugs is one of the world's most important money earners. The retail value of drugs, is around 500 billion US dollars a year, now is more than the value of the international trade in oil and is second only to that of the arms trade. The consumption of illicit drugs not only has serious physical, social and economic consequences for the individual consumer, but also has enormous costs on society as a whole, and ultimately funds massive criminal systems. People may choose to take drugs to rebel, to escape, to survive, to belong or for resignation. Why do people produce and traffic illicit drugs, and how are they able to do it on such a large scale? Well one obvious reason is the money that they will make in servicing consumer demand for drugs. The structure of society and all the strength of political power are factors that influence how successfully illicit drugs can be produced and traded.

This paper, focuses on the social consequences of these activities and the forces contributing to the global drug problem.

The Illicit Drug Problem, Why has it Become Worse?

Illicit drugs usually move internationally from poor areas of the world to more developed countries, where most drug consumption takes place. In recent years, as the growth of legitimate businesses has been facilitated by the market relations, drug producers and traffickers have taken advantage of the opportunities presented by the changing macro-economic environment. They have put themselves on a global scale and put a small proportion of their drug profits in financial centers offering services and attractive investment returns. Their usage of high-tech computers and communications technology has facilitated the expansion of their trade and the protection of "company secrets".

Drug traffickers are now able to launder illicit profits by moving money around the world electronically with few national controls. They are aided by weak governments who need extra money and weak or unenforceable laws against money laundering, fraud or organized crime.

Production

Legitimate production of drugs only occurs for medical and scientific purposes. India is a large producer of licitopium, and Bolivia and Peru produce between them about 20,000 tons of legal coca leaves each year for traditional or medical uses (www.unodc.org/unodc/global_illicit_drug_trends.html).

Production estimates for legal drug crops are much more accurate than for illegal ones but than of course that is obvious, but even under the best of numbers that you have in front of you, illicit drug production figures are only rough estimates because of the clandestine business of much of the drug trade. Nevertheless, the main producing and trafficking countries are known to be Afghanistan, Bolivia, Colombia, Iran, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand.

Drug production and trade create benefits for the main producing countries. Illicit drugs can be very important to the national economy: in Bolivia, for instance, cocaine economy has generated more revenue than any other single export in recent years. Supplying drugs to an international market has benefited hundreds of thousands of people. Poor farmers in many drug producing countries have earned more money, and have more power over their destiny and that of their children.

Why do People Continue to Grow Illicit Drug Crops? Poverty and the attractive economic opportunities are the main factors contributing to growers. The principal drug growing regions are among the poorest and economically inactive in the world, and in many of them life is declining, in part as a result from chemicals that the grower's crops give off. In many of these rural areas, illegal drug growers can make from 10 to 50 times more in providing the illegal drug market than they can in any other agricultural life. Although producing drug crops involves risk, the high returns they get back make these crops worth the risk and many leave the less risky agricultural activities.

Trafficking

What has Helped Traffickers to Succeed?

Traffickers have been helped by two things. First, materials are easy to obtain because, as said above, rural poverty and the failure of development have attracted many poor farmers to drug crops. And second, the low salaries paid to the local, national and international officials involved in fighting drugs, meaning traffickers are able to offer bribes for their silence and made them look another way, this has increased the ability of traffickers to corrupt such officials some even in higher rank, and not just at the border. Where political institutions are powerful, traffickers appear to have trouble in strongly disrupting and have an influence on the national life, although they may cause considerable local disruption, as it has happened in inner cities in the United States.

In institutionally weak countries, however, drug traffickers take on a struggle for the nation's institutional life, they thrive for territory and for control fighting over the lives of many citizens and what group they will terrorize first. This can be seen, for example, in Afghanistan, Colombia, Myanmar and Peru. When international markets are low and traffickers are not making as much money as they are costumed to, traffickers work to improve the quality of their products, and modern technology has helped them in this process. They are mainly interested in reducing the detectability and weight-to-price ratio of their products in order to ease the process of smuggling.

Such processing involves the high concentration of alkaloids which frequently heightens the addiction rate among local populations and could be even more fatal than the one that is already exposed to the world (as in Pakistan, for instance). Traffickers are highly mobile and there is no restrictions by national boundaries. They shift their laboratories and trade routes in their search for easy work environment, most of the preferring to go where national governments are least in control. Like in the Golden Triangle (Laos, Myanmar, Thailand), for example, traffickers limit operations concentrating at points of least resistance and change their territory from year to year. When the Colombian government cracks down on its drug operators, they take up temporary laboratories in Bolivia, Miami, Panama or Peru and handle their operations from there in some cases it turns out to be a better profit to them in these places.

What is to be Done?

This question puts together some of the world's most talked about procedure issues. Should stronger prohibition