By Celerino Castillo, III , Dave Harmon
The truth about the remaining dark secret of the Iran-Contra scandal- the United States government's collaboration with drug smugglers. Powderburns is the story of Celerino Castillo III who spent 12 years in the Drug Enforcement Administration. During that time, he built cases against organized drug rings in Manhattan, raided jungle cocaine labs in the Amazon, conducted aerial eradication operations in Guatemala, and assembled and trained anti-narcotics units in several countries. The eerie climax of Agent Castillo's career with the DEA took place in El Salvador. One day, he received a cable from a fellow agent. He was told to investigate possible drug smuggling by Nicaraguan Contras operating from the ilpango air force base. Castillo quickly discovered that Contra pilots were, indeed, smuggling narcotics back into the United States - using the same pilots, planes, and hangars that the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, under the Direction of Lt. Col. Oliver North, used to maintain their covert supply operation to the Contras.sm
Oakville, Ont: Mosaic Press,1994. 205p.
By John Coleman
The drug trade is a very profitable business of enormous proportions, stretching across the world from producer countries to consumer countries, of which the United States of America is the leader. The cost of the product is negligible, with profits far exceeding those of some of the greatest companies in modern times. The drug trade is a war being waged principally against the United States , where innovative methods and ever-shifting pitched battles are fought. Thus far, nothing has been able to put an end to this cancer upon the United States and other western countries.
This book tells, in alarming detail, the story of how the drug trade was started in earnest with the arrival of a mop-haired group of musicians known as the Beatles. The band was brought to the U.S. to go on concert tours, which acted as a magnet for teenagers and provided cover for the distribution of drugs that got a generation of young Americans hooked.
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Most Americans have only been exposed to the street pusher and know very little about the insidious, illicit trade being carried out in their country; a trade that has cost time and billions in health care and anti-drug police expenditures. This timely book by Dr. Coleman rips the lid off the drug trade, from the opium growing poppy fields of Afghanistan to the desolate coast line at Maccra, Pakistan, to the British Bank of the Middle East in Dubai and beyond to the cocoa bush processing plants in Bolivia and Colombia, where the murderous M19 FARC guerillas, better armed than the Colombian military, run the country.
This account is no soap opera, but real life in which the drug trade is playing an increasingly ugly and costly role of our treasure and finances. It is a book which should be read by every thinking person concerned about the welfare of his country.Description text goes here
Carson City, NV: World In Review, 2009. 203p.
By Matthew B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen
First published in 2007, Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics critically analyzed claims made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the White House agency of accountability in the nation's drug war since 1989, as found in the six editions of the annual National Drug Control Strategy between 2000 and 2005. In this revised and updated second edition of their critically acclaimed work, Matthew B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen examine seven more recent editions (2006–2012) to once again determine if ONDCP accurately and honestly presents information or intentionally distorts evidence to justify continuing the drug war. They uncover the many ways in which ONDCP manipulates statistics and visually presents that information to the public. Their analysis demonstrates a drug war that consistently fails to reduce drug use, drug fatalities, or illnesses associated with drug use; fails to provide treatment for drug-dependent users; and drives up the prices of drugs. They conclude with policy recommendations for reforming ONDCP's use of statistics, as well as how the nation fights the war on drugs.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014. 310p.
By The Global Commission on Drug Policy
The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed. Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of drug use. Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.
Global Commission on Drug Policy, 2011. 24p.
By Horace A. Bartilow
In this book, Horace Bartilow develops a theory of embedded corporatism to explain the U.S. government’s war on drugs. Stemming from President Richard Nixon’s 1971 call for an international approach to this “war,” U.S. drug enforcement policy has persisted with few changes to the present day, despite widespread criticism of its effectiveness and of its unequal effects on hundreds of millions of people across the Americas. While researchers consistently emphasize the role of race in U.S. drug enforcement, Bartilow’s empirical analysis highlights the class dimension of the drug war and the immense power that American corporations wield within the regime.
Drawing on qualitative case study methods, declassified U.S. government documents, and advanced econometric estimators that analyze cross-national data, Bartilow demonstrates how corporate power is projected and embedded—in lobbying, financing of federal elections, funding of policy think tanks, and interlocks with the federal government and the military. Embedded corporatism, he explains, creates the conditions by which interests of state and nonstate members of the regime converge to promote capital accumulation. The subsequent human rights repression, illiberal democratic governments, anti-worker practices, and widening income inequality throughout the Americas, Bartilow argues, are the pathological policy outcomes of embedded corporatism in drug enforcement.
Chapel Hill, NC:The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 320p.
By James Gray
Veteran trial judge and former federal prosecutor Judge James P. Gray believes drug prohibition remains one of our country's biggest failed policies. In this updated edition of his bestseller, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What Can We Do About It, Judge Gray provides startling information about drug-related crimes from escalating incarceration rates to drug-related kidnappings. Judge Gray also examines the latest experiments in drug legalization. The thirteen states that have adopted medical marijuana have seen a reduction in crime and an increase in revenue. Judge Gray explains how and why we need to take the profit out of the drug trade. There are viable options at work in other countries. Portugal saw a drop of 50 percent in drug usage by problem users after decriminalization, as well as a drop in children's drug use! This incendiary book will anger readers, but it also provides hope. We can solve some of our medical and social problems by repealing our failed drug laws.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 302p.
By John Coyne and Teagan Westendorf
This report helps develop an understanding of the quantum of profits being made and where in the value chain they occur. Australians spent approximately A$5.8 billion on methamphetamine and A$470 million on heroin in FY 2019.
Approximately A$1,216,806,017 was paid to international wholesalers overseas for the amphetamine and heroin that was smuggled into Australia in that year. The profit that remained in Australia’s economy was about A$5,012,150,000. Those funds are undermining Australia’s public health and distorting our economy daily, and ultimately funding drug cartels and traffickers in Southeast Asia.
One key takeaway from the figures presented in this report is that the Australian drug trade is large and growing. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement agencies, methamphetamine and heroin use has been increasing by up to 17% year on year. Falling prices in Southeast Asia are likely to keep pushing that number up, while drug prices and purity in Australia remain relatively stable.
Barton, ACT, Australia: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2021. 40p
By David A. Shirk
The drug war in Mexico has caused some U.S. analysts to view Mexico as a failed or failing state. While these fears are exaggerated, the problems of widespread crime and violence, government corruption, and inadequate access to justice pose grave challenges for the Mexican state. The Obama administration has therefore affirmed its commitment to assist Mexico through continued bilateral collaboration, funding for judicial and security sector reform, and building “resilient communities.”
David A. Shirk analyzes the drug war in Mexico, explores Mexico’s capacities and limitations, examines the factors that have undermined effective state performance, assesses the prospects for U.S. support to strengthen critical state institutions, and offers recommendations for reducing the potential of state failure. He argues that the United States should help Mexico address its pressing crime and corruption problems by going beyond traditional programs to strengthen the country’s judicial and security sector capacity and help it build stronger political institutions, a more robust economy, and a thriving civil society.
Washington, DC; Council on Foireign Relations Press, 2011, 56p.
By RAND Europe
This document is the final report of a study commissioned by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) in November 2019 to examine Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based capabilities for border and coast guard applications. This report presents the main findings of the study, including: A characterisation of the evolving landscape of AI-based capabilities in border security and mapping of the technology, capability areas and border security functions to which AI may be applied; Mapping of the current and desired capability levels for nine selected technology areas, as well as pathways to their adoption; Discussion of cross-cutting enablers and barriers for adoption of AI-based capabilities in border security; and Reflections on the implications for Frontex.
Warsaw, Poland: Frontex – European Border and Coast Guard Agency, 2020. 167p.
By Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings
The paper aims to leverage off of the strengths and successes of established but disparate anti-THB financial investigatory practices, developed across the OSCE participating States, to raise awareness of the strategic value of financial investigations and the resources available, and to help create a more harmonised approach that can contribute to mainstreaming of financial investigations across the OSCE region.
Vienna: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, 2019. 68p.
Edited by Sandra M. Bucerius and Michael Tonry
Social tensions between majority and minority populations often center on claims that minorities are largely responsible for crime and disorder. Members of some disadvantaged groups in all developed countries, sometimes long-standing residents and other times recent immigrants, experience unwarranted disparities in their dealings with the criminal justice system. Accusations of unfair treatment by police and courts are common. The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration provides comprehensive analyses of current knowledge about these and a host of related subjects. Topics include legal and illegal immigration, ethnic and race relations, and discrimination and exclusion, and their links to crime in the United States and elsewhere. Leading scholars from sociology, criminology, law, psychology, geography, and political science document and explore relations among race, ethnicity, immigration, and crime.
Individual chapters provide in-depth critical overviews of key issues, controversies, and research. Contributors present the historical backdrops of their subjects, describe population characteristics, and summarize relevant data and research findings. Most articles provide synopses of racial, ethnic, immigration, and justice-related concerns and offer policy recommendations and proposals for future research. Some articles are case studies of particular problems in particular places, including juvenile incarceration, homicide, urban violence, social exclusion, and other issues disproportionately affecting disadvantaged minority groups. The Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration is the first major effort to examine and synthesize knowledge concerning immigration and crime, ethnicity and crime, and race and crime in one volume, and does so both for the United States and for many other countries.
Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 960p.
By William F. McDonald
This book offers a comprehensive examination of the many forms of victimization of immigrants, including trafficking in persons for sexual exploitation and forced labor; assaulting, robbing and raping; refusing to pay wages; renting illegal living space that violates health codes; and domestic abuse both in general, and in particular, of mail-order brides.
McDonald examines a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data from historical and international sources including the USA, Canada, Mexico, Britain, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and Spain. He writes with a view to correcting myths about the relationship between immigrants and crime, noting that immigrants are more likely to become victims than offenders.
The book outlines the multiple forms and contexts in which immigrants are victimized, exploited, and harmed. Reviewing micro- and macro-level victimological and sociological theories as they apply to patterns and forms of immigrants’ victimization, this study ultimately seeks to understand reasons for which immigrants are victimized by their own kind, and by persons outside their community.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 135p.
By Jacob I. Stowell
Stowell examines the impact of immigration on violent crime. Crimiological theory, and particularly social disorganization theory, has held that immigration is inextricably linked to crime. Stowell tests whether patterns of neighborhood-level violence are partially attributable to the population characteristics of an area, and, in particular, to its nativity composition. His analyses offer both support for and challenges to social disorganization theory. Consistent with theoretical expectations, immigration is found to be indirectly associated with levels of violence. Little support, however, is found for the notion that immigrants are a largely homogeneous population, or that immigration is positively associated with property crime. The results call for a refinement of the disorganization theory, one that is sensitive to the differences among the foreign-born population and one that does not assume a negative impact of immigration on neighborhood social structure and violence.
New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2017. 184p.
Edited by Ilias Bantekas and Emmanouela Mylonaki
This volume is one of the few books to explain in-depth the international crimes behind the scenes of substantive or procedural law. The contributors place a particular focus on what motivates participation in international crime, how perpetrators, witnesses and victims see their predicament and how international crimes should be investigated at local and international level, with an emphasis on context. The book engages these questions with a broad interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to both lawyers and non-lawyers alike. It discusses international crime through the lens of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, state crime theory and information systems theory and draws upon relevant investigative experience from experts in international and domestic law prosecutions.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 336p.
Edited by William S. Laufer and Freda Adler
The Criminology of Criminal Law considers the relation between criminal law and theories of crime, criminality and justice. This book discusses a wide range of topics, including: the way in which white-collar crime is defined; new perspectives on stranger violence; the reasons why criminologists have neglected the study of genocide; the idea of boundary crossing in the control of deviance; the relation between punishment and social solidarity; the connection between the notion of justice and modern sentencing theory; the social reaction to treason; and the association between politics and punitiveness.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013. 557p.
By Synøve Nygaard Andersen and Torbjørn Skardhamar
Previous studies have identified an "immigrant paradox" in crime in which crime rates are highest among immigrants who are young when they arrive in the host country, even though social capital and integration in the labour market and social networks favour the young. We use Norwegian registry data to estimate the probability of committing at least one crime in any year after the year of immigration, and we include interaction terms between age and age at immigration to explore the troublesome temporal association between age, age at immigration and duration of residence. The results suggest an overall negative association between age at immigration and registered crime, which seems to be exaggerated by the residual effect of the omitted duration of residence variable. Comparability of results between studies depends crucially on how age at immigration is measured.
Oslo: Statistics Norway, Research Department, 2012. 32p.
By Brian Bell, Stephen Machin and Francesco Fasani
This paper examines the relationship between immigration and crime in a setting where large migration flows offer an opportunity to carefully appraise whether the populist view that immigrants cause crime is borne out by rigorous evidence. We consider possible crime effects from two large waves of immigration that recently occurred in the UK. The first of these was the late 1990s/early 2000s wave of asylum seekers, and the second the large inflow of workers from EU accession countries that took place from 2004. A simple economics of crime model, when dovetailed with facts about the relative labour market position of these migrant groups, suggests net returns to criminal activity are likely to be very different for the two waves. In fact, we show that the first wave led to a small rise in property crime, whilst the second wave had no such impact. There was no observable effect on violent crime for either wave. Nor were immigrant arrest rates different to natives. Evidence from victimization data also suggests that the changes in crime rates during the immigrant waves cannot be ascribed to crimes against immigrants. Overall, our findings suggest that focusing on the limited labour market opportunities of asylum seekers could have beneficial effects on crime rates.
Bonn: IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor, 2010. 47p.
By Christopher T. Dietzel
This dissertation highlighted and addressed the nature and extent of sexual violence against men who have sex with men (MSM) that is facilitated through their use of dating apps. The dissertation includes three manuscripts, each of which details a unique study. The first study investigated MSM dating app users’ conceptualizations and negotiations of sexual consent. Findings revealed that MSM identify consent frameworks but do not always apply those frameworks, or apply their interpretations of those frameworks, to their online and in-person sexual interactions with other MSM dating users. The second study examined MSM dating app users’ experiences of sending and receiving unsolicited dick pics. Findings uncovered a diversity in MSM’s experiences that are reflected along three “dimensions”: wanted/unwanted, consensual/non-consensual, and typical/atypical. Findings also revealed seven factors that impact MSM’s experiences of sending and receiving unsolicited dick pics. The third study investigated manifestation of rape culture that are facilitated through MSM’s use of dating apps. Findings showed that unwanted sexual messages and images are common manifestations of rape culture on dating apps. Findings also demonstrated that rape culture extends from online interactions to in-person interactions. Several MSM disclosed sexual violence they experienced through their use of dating apps, and one admitted to perpetrating sexual violence. This dissertation reveals the ways in which MSM experience and perpetrate sexual violence through their use of dating apps, as well as the ways in which dating apps facilitate sexual violence. Recommendations for education, community work, law and policy, and dating app software development are offered, along with limitations and suggestions for future research
Montreal: McGill University, 2021. 264p.
By Coen Teunissen, Hayley Boxall, Sarah Napier and Rick Brown
This study presents the findings from a large survey of people living in Australia (n=9,987) who had used mobile dating apps and/or dating websites in the previous five years. Across the entire sample, 12.4 percent of respondents reported receiving requests to facilitate the sexual exploitation of their own children or children they had access to. Requests included asking for sexual information about children or for sexual images or videos of children, asking to meet children in person or asking for children to perform sex acts over webcam.
The paper highlights the need for additional safety features to be embedded in mobile dating apps and dating websites to protect vulnerable users and to prevent the sexual exploitation of children.
Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2022. 14p.