Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” Since that time, the country has incarcerated thousands of citizens and spent billions of dollars, and yet the drug problem rolls on. Today, the illegal drug market funds international terrorism, the horrific drug war on the Mexican border, and the senseless violence plaguing our communities, large and small. It is past time for a new direction. This book provides a drug policy framework that will choke off the revenue supporting the illegal drug market. Howard Rahtz outlines a series of drug policy steps buttressed by a historical review of drug policy measures, a review of international efforts against trafficking, and a clear understanding of the dynamics of addiction and its role in facilitating the illegal drug market.
One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.
Over the last few decades, drug trafficking organizations in Latin America became infamous for their shocking public crimes, from narcoterrorist assaults on the Colombian political system in the 1980s to the more recent wave of beheadings in Mexico. However, while these highly visible forms of public violence dominate headlines, they are neither the most common form of drug violence nor simply the result of brutality. Rather, they stem from structural conditions that vary from country to country and from era to era. In The Politics of Drug Violence, Angelica Durán-Martínez shows how variation in drug violence results from the complex relationship between state power and criminal competition. Drawing on remarkably extensive fieldwork, this book compares five cities that have been home to major trafficking organizations for the past four decades: Cali and Medellín in Colombia, and Ciudad Juárez, Culiacán, and Tijuana in Mexico. She shows that violence escalates when trafficking organizations compete and the state security apparatus is fragmented. However, when the criminal market is monopolized and the state security apparatus cohesive, violence tends to be more hidden and less frequent. The size of drug profits does not determine violence levels, and neither does the degree of state weakness. Rather, the forms and scale of violent crime derive primarily from the interplay between marketplace competition and state cohesiveness. An unprecedentedly rich empirical account of one of the worst problems of our era, the book will reshape our understanding of the forces driving organized criminal violence in Latin America and elsewhere.
"An extensive overview of the drug trade in the Americas and its impact on politics, economics, and society throughout the region. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice "A first-rate update on the state of the long-fought hemispheric 'war on drugs.' It is particularly timely, as the perception that the war is lost and needs to be changed has never been stronger in Latin and North America."--Paul Gootenberg, author of Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug "A must-read volume for policy makers, concerned citizens, and students alike in the current search for new approaches to forty-year-old policies largely considered to have failed."--David Scott Palmer, coauthor of Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace "A very useful primer for anyone trying to keep up with the ever-evolving relationship between drug enforcement and drug trafficking."--Peter Andreas, author of Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America 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. This volume argues that the war on drugs has been ineffective at best and, at worst, has been highly detrimental to many countries. Leading experts in the fields of public health, political science, and national security analyze how U.S. policies have affected the internal dynamics of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. Together, they present a comprehensive overview of the major trends in drug trafficking and organized crime in the early twenty-first century. In addition, the editors and contributors identify emerging issues and propose several policy options to address them. This accessible and expansive volume provides a framework for understanding the limits and liabilities in the U.S.-championed war on drugs throughout the Americas.
Violence is widely associated with illegal drug markets, and is one of the features that can differentiate illegal capitalism from legitimate business. This book explores the perceived causes and functions of violence in an illegal drug market in Dublin City, Ireland. Understanding why violence occurs amongst participants in illegal drug markets is an ongoing part of the criminological endeavour. Scholars debate the various business and personal factors that contribute towards violent perpetration. Complex aspects of participants’ lives, such as addictive disorders, socioeconomic status, and socialisation, add further complexity. This book examines violence in an illegal drug market from the perspectives of those who had participated in it, that is, formerly addicted people as well as former profit-oriented drug dealers. The text is the result of the first ethnographic study of an illegal drug market in Dublin. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars interested in the criminology and psychology of violence. More specifically, the book will be relevant to those interested in the areas of illegal drug markets, gang studies, the intersection of drugs and crime, and desistance from crime.
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insiderÕs look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as ÒStickup Kids,Ó these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robberyÕs violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.
Mexico is a country in crisis. Capitalizing on weakened public institutions, widespread unemployment, a state of lawlessness and the strengthening of links between Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, narcotrafficking in the country has flourished during the post-1982 neoliberal era. In fact, it has become one of Mexico's biggest source of revenue, as well as its most violent, with over 12,000 drug-related executions in 2011 alone. In response, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, armed with millions of dollars in US military aid, has launched a crackdown, ostensibly to combat organised crime. Despite this, human rights violations have increased, as has the murder rate, making Ciudad Juárez on the northern border the most dangerous city on the planet. Meanwhile, the supply of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine has continued to grow. In this insightful and controversial book, Watt and Zepeda throw new light on the situation, contending that the 'war on drugs' in Mexico is in fact the pretext for a US-backed strategy to bolster unpopular neoliberal policies, a weak yet authoritarian government and a radically unfair status quo.
Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics explores the notoriously brutal Philippine war on drugs from below. Steffen Bo Jensen and Karl Hapal examine how the war on drugs folded itself into communal and intimate spheres in one Manila neighborhood, Bagong Silang. Police killings have been regular occurrences since the birth of Bagong Silang. Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics shows that although the drug war was introduced from the outside, it fit into and perpetuated already existing gendered and generational structures. In Bagong Silang, the war on drugs implicated local structures of authority, including a justice system that had always been deeply integrated into communal relations. The ways in which the war on drugs transformed these intimate relations between the state and its citizens, and between neighbors, may turn out to be the most lasting impact of Duterte's infamously violent policies.
This volume fills a research gap of striking proportions by exploring the contingencies that mediate the crimes perpetrated on those who are themselves perpetrators. The notion that violence is something that happens only to law-abiding citizens is both widely held and inaccurate. The disproportionate share of victims of crime are, in reality, themselves involved in crime. Yet existing scholarship has failed to explore the contingencies that mediate offenses like drug robbery - from the forces that inspire it, to the methods used to select targets, to the means employed to generate compliance, down to the tactics used to thwart retaliatory attempts after the crime has ended.Given that predatory behavior between and among offenders ultimately spreads to society at large (the ""contagion effect""), a research gap of striking proportions has emerged. The imprudence of robbing other criminals is widely assumed. Yet criminologists paradoxically observe that a major benefit of robbing fellow criminals is that they cannot report the offense to the authorities. Why, then, should offenders elect to reduce their odds of getting arrested at the cost of enhancing their chances of getting killed?Drawing on candid interviews with the perpetrators, Jacobs attempts to answer such questions and fill this gap in the research agenda of criminology. The result is a narrative that explores the world of street-corner drugs from the vantage point of those who actually commit these high-risk crimes. It also introduces serious ethical issues that criminology and law enforcement tend to gloss over or ignore entirely. This work is innovative and troubling at the same time. It takes a theme that Hollywood films have explored in greater depth than social science, and restores it as a crucial part of the ethnography of crime.
