By Jason Eligh

The countries of Eastern and Southern Africa have a long history of illicit drug cultivation, production, consumption and trade. Khat, a crop that is indigenous to the Horn and coastal East Africa, has been used as a stimulant since the 12th century. Cannabis, originally imported from Asia, has a history of several hundred years of production and use in the region.

Initially, the informal policies surrounding the control of these drugs had been driven by traditional social networks, and cultural beliefs and practices. Today, however, it is the more recent large-scale trade in and widespread use of opiates, stimulants and other synthetic substances that has become recognized as a harmful phenomenon and risk to the region. As container and intermodal shipping grew rapidly through the 1970s, along with new long-haul mass transport and passenger aircraft, the global economic landscape in general, and illicit drug marketplaces in particular, were reshaped. The development of the region’s air and seaports, and their integration into global transport and communication networks, saw the emergence of new entrepôt trade, and hubs of commerce became networked across the continent. Meanwhile, technological innovations designed to increase the volume of drug commodity movement and decrease the risk of seizure began to emerge. With these developments, many nascent networks of African drug traders began to consolidate their positions in the drug economies of Eastern and Southern Africa.

As international drug control measures began to restrict supply chains from South Asian and Latin American source points, new trafficking routes evolved in Eastern and Southern African states to circumvent these measures, thus opening new supply channels and, consequently, new markets. From the 1980s, the continental consumption, production and distribution of substances such as heroin, cocaine, cannabis and synthetic drugs grew notably, and the impact of this expanding illicit market on development was significant, and paradoxically symbiotic. The emerging illicit drug markets were both a threat to development and security in the region and at the same time a new source of economic livelihood for populations of poor and vulnerable communities.

The 1990s saw significant, rapid drug trade expansion across the continent as Afghan heroin began to emerge in volume in East Africa. Shipped by dhow to Kenyan and Tanzanian ports from Pakistan and Iranian departure points, initially to be repackaged and trans-shipped to European and US markets, local heroin use began to grow. Heroin use spread along the eastern coast and to South Africa, as well as to some island states, such as Mauritius and the Seychelles. Across the region these heroin users tended to be among the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. Injection drug use soon emerged in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, eSwatini, Namibia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Cocaine, methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs soon followed.

Today, Eastern and Southern African countries have become significant illicit drug transit hubs and destination markets for a diversity of illicit drugs. Growing consumer demand and improved infrastructure have shaped and facilitated the availability and accessibility of illicit drugs across the region. As a consequence, domestic and regional drug trade flows and user markets have become embedded features of the region’s domestic illicit economies.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime 2021. 28p.

By Peter Reuter

The production of cocaine and heroin, the two most important drugs economically, has been concentrated in a small number of poor nations for 25 years. A slightly larger number of developing nations have been affected by large-scale trafficking in these two drugs. This paper reviews what is known about drug control programs and considers non-traditional options. The usual array of programs for suppressing drug problems, enforcement, treatment, harm reduction and prevention have been assessed almost exclusively in wealthy nations. Although treatment has been shown to be cost-effective, it is of minimal relevance for reducing the drug problems of nations such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico or Tajikistan, which are primarily harmed by production and trafficking rather than consumption. Efforts to reduce drug production and trafficking have not been subject to systematic evaluation but the best interpretation of the available evidence is that they have had minimal effect on the quantities produced or trafficked. It is reasonable to conclude that international drug control efforts can do more to affect where these drugs are produced rather than the quantity. If that is the case, and given that spreading a specific level of production or trafficking to more rather than fewer nations probably decreases global welfare, it may be appropriate to consider a less aggressive stance to current producers and to make strategic decisions about the location of an industry producing a global bad.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 38p.

By Daniel Mejia and Carlos Esteban Posada

The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the information currently available on cocaine production and trafficking. The paper starts by describing the available data on cocaine production and trade, the collection methodologies (if available) used by different sources, the main biases in the data, and the accuracy of different data sources. Next, it states some of the key empirical questions and hypotheses regarding cocaine production and trade and takes a first look at how well the data match these hypotheses. The paper states some of the main puzzles in the cocaine market and studies some of the possible explanations. These puzzles and empirical questions should guide future research on the key determinants of illicit drug production and trafficking. Finally, the paper studies the different policies that producer countries have adopted to fight against cocaine production and the role consumer countries play in the implementation of anti-drug policies.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 62p.

By Daniel Mejía and Pascual Restrepo

This paper provides a thorough economic evaluation of the anti-drug policies implemented in Colombia between 2000 and 2006 under the so-called Plan Colombia. The paper develops a game theory model of the war against illegal drugs in producer countries. We explicitly model illegal drug markets, which allows us to account for the feedback effects between policies and market outcomes that are potentially important when evaluating large scale policy interventions such as Plan Colombia. We use available data for the war on cocaine production and trafficking as well as outcomes from the cocaine markets to calibrate the parameters of the model. Using the results from the calibration we estimate important measures of the costs, effectiveness, and efficiency of the war on drugs in Colombia. Finally we carry out simulations in order to assess the impact of increases in the U.S. budget allocated to Plan Colombia, and find that a three-fold increase in the U.S. budget allocated to the war on drugs in Colombia would decrease the amount of cocaine that successfully reaches consumer countries by about 17%.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2008. 60p.

By United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

In The globalization of crime: a transnational organized crime threat assessment, UNODC analyses a range of key transnational crime threats, including human trafficking, migrant smuggling, the illicit heroin and cocaine trades, cybercrime, maritime piracy and trafficking in environmental resources, firearms and counterfeit goods. The report also examines a number of cases where transnational organized crime and instability amplify each other to create vicious circles in which countries or even subregions may become locked. Thus, the report offers a striking view of the global dimensions of organized crime today.

Vienna: UNODC, 2010. 314p.

By David E. Brown.

International criminal networks mainly from Latin America and Africa—some with links to terrorism—are turning West Africa into a key global hub for the distribution, wholesaling, and production of illicit drugs. These groups represent an existential threat to democratic governance of already fragile states in the subregion because they are using narco-corruption to stage coups d’état, hijack elections, and co-opt or buy political power. Besides a spike in drug-related crime, narcotics trafficking is also fraying West Africa’s traditional social fabric and creating a public health crisis, with hundreds of thousands of new drug addicts. While the inflow of drug money may seem economically beneficial to West Africa in the short-term, investors will be less inclined to do business in the long-term if the subregion is unstable. On net, drug trafficking and other illicit trade represent the most serious challenge to human security in the region since resource conflicts rocked several West African countries in the early 1990s. International aid to West Africa’s “war on drugs” is only in an initial stage; progress will be have to be measured in decades or even generations, not years and also unfold in parallel with creating alternative sustainable livelihoods and addressing the longer-term challenges of human insecurity, poverty, and underdevelopment.

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2013. 104p.