By Vanda Felbab-Brown, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Carol Graham, Keith Humphreys, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Bryce Pardo, Peter Reuter, Bradley D. Stein, and Paul H. Wise

This Brookings opioid project, “The Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions,” has analyzed policy options for reducing demand, providing treatment, designing regulatory frameworks, and implementing domestic law enforcement and international supply control measures. It has explored local impacts on communities as well as state and federal level responses and international actions. It has paid special attention to vulnerable communities, such as politically and economically disenfranchised Americans, women and children, and military veterans.

Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 2020. 15p.

Edited by Corinna Elsenbroich, David Anzola and Nigel Gilbert

This book presents a multi-disciplinary investigation into extortion rackets with a particular focus on the structures of criminal organisations and their collapse, societal processes in which extortion rackets strive and fail and the impacts of bottom-up and top-down ways of fighting extortion racketeering. Through integrating a range of disciplines and methods the book provides an extensive case study of empirically based computational social science. It is based on a wealth of qualitative data regarding multiple extortion rackets, such as the Sicilian Mafia, an international money laundering organisation and a predatory extortion case in Germany. Computational methods are used for data analysis, to help in operationalising data for use in agent-based models and to explore structures and dynamics of extortion racketeering through simulations. In addition to textual data sources, stakeholders and experts are extensively involved, providing narratives for analysis and qualitative validation of models. The book presents a systematic application of computational social science methods to the substantive area of extortion racketeering. The reader will gain a deep understanding of extortion rackets, in particular their entrenchment in society and processes supporting and undermining extortion rackets. Also covered are computational social science methods, in particular computationally assisted text analysis and agent-based modelling, and the integration of empirical, theoretical and computational social science.

Cham, SWIT: Springer, 2016. 250p.

By Eduardo Sáenz Rovner and Russ Davidson

A comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, The Cuban Connection challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution. Eduardo S?enz Rovner argues that Cuba's historically well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks combined with political instability and rampant official corruption to help lay the foundation for the development of organized crime structures powerful enough to affect Cuba's domestic and foreign politics and its very identity as a nation.S?enz traces the routes taken around the world by traffickers and smugglers. After Cuba, the most important player in this story is the United States. The involvement of gangsters and corrupt U.S. officials and businessmen enabled prohibited substances to reach a strong market in the United States, from rum running during Prohibition to increased demand for narcotics during the Cold War.

Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 247p.

By Marc Mauer

For more than a quarter century the “war on drugs” has exerted a profound impact on the structure and scale of the criminal justice system. The inception of the “war” in the 1980s has been a major contributing factor to the historic rise in the prison population during this period. From a figure of about 40,000 people incarcerated in prison or jail for a drug offense in 1980, there has since been an 1100% increase to a total of 500,000 today. To place some perspective on that change, the number of people incarcerated for a drug offense is now greater than the number incarcerated for all offenses in 1980. The increase in incarceration for drug offenses has been fueled by sharply escalated law enforcement targeting of drug law violations, often accompanied by enhanced penalties for such offenses. Many of the mandatory sentencing provisions adopted in both state and federal law have been focused on drug offenses. At the federal level, the most notorious of these are the penalties for crack cocaine violations, whereby crack offenses are punished far more severely than powder cocaine offenses, even though the two substances are pharmacologically identical. Despite changes in federal sentencing guidelines, the mandatory provisions still in place require that anyone convicted of possessing as little as five grams of crack cocaine (the weight of two sugar packets) receive a five-year prison term for a first-time offense

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2009. 23p.

By Nazgol Ghandnoosh and Casey Anderson

More people died from opioid-related deaths in 2015 than in any previous year. This record number quadrupled the level of such deaths in 1999. Unlike the heroin and crack crises of the past, the current opioid emergency has disproportionately affected white Americans—poor and rural, but also middle class or affluent and suburban. This association has boosted support for preventative and treatment-based policy solutions. But the pace of the response has been slow, critical components of the solution—such as health insurance coverage expansion and improved access to medication assisted treatment—face resistance, and there are growing efforts to revamp the failed and costly War on Drugs.

This report examines the sources of the opioid crisis, surveys health and justice policy responses at the federal and state levels, and draws on lessons from past drug crises to provide guidance on how to proceed.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2017. 35p.

By The Strategic Response Group (SRG)

The Strategic Response Group (SRG)is a partnership set up to address public substance misuse and perceived anti-social behaviour in Dublin city centre. This report - Report of the Strategic Response Group to build sustainable street-level drug services and address related public nuisance - acknowledges that for historical reasons there is a clustering of drug treatment and homelessness services in or adjacent to the inner city. While these services play a major role in the provision of effective treatment to problematic drug users, the report recommends that there should be greater access to prompt provision of treatment options nationally and that people should be treated and accommodated in the most appropriate setting for their circumstances and provided with support services as close to their home as possible.

The report takes a holistic approach to address the issues of the city centre. The group have set out their recommendations in the short, media and long term and under the headings of treatment, rehabilitation, homelessness, policing responses, planning and urban design, legislation and regulation and implementation.

Dublin: The Strategic Response Group, 2012. 24p.

By Stephen Rolles

Global drug policy is rooted in a laudable urge to address the very real harms that non-medical psychoactive drugs can create. Such concerns have driven a prohibitionist global agenda: an agenda that gives clear and direct moral authority to those who support it, while casting those who are against it as ethically and politically irresponsible. However, such binary thinking can be problematic. By defining the most stringent prohibition as the most moral position, it makes nuanced consideration of the impacts of prohibition difficult. In particular, it makes it very difficult to look at and learn from the impacts and achievements of prohibition. Historic attempts to do so have foundered on a sense that analysing prohibition means questioning prohibition, and that questioning prohibition is in itself an immoral act—one that allies the questioner with the well known infamies of the world’s illegal drug trade. Ironically, supporting the status quo perpetuates that trade, and the harms that it creates.

It is not the purpose of this report to revisit these various findings; they are freely and easily available elsewhere. Rather, we seek to reconsider the management of illicit drugs in the light of the experience that they represent and embody. Using that experience, we will set out a blueprint for non-medical drug management policies that will minimise the harms that such drug use creates, both on a personal and on a societal level. In short, our goal is to define a set of practical and effective risk and harm management and reduction policies. Such policies will represent a clear and positive step towards the positive outcomes that prohibition has tried, and failed, to achieve. A strictly prohibitionist stance would understand them to be immoral, because they call for the legally regulated production and availability of many currently proscribed drugs. Transform’s position is, in fact, driven by an ethics of effectiveness, and as such represent an attempt to re-frame the global harm management debate in exclusively practical terms

London: Transform Drug Policy Foundation, 2009. 232p.

By Marie Claire Van Hout and Tim Bingham

This research aimed to assemble an evidence base around perceived anti-social behaviour associated with the provision of drug treatment in Dublin’s city centre, upon which to build a strategic response incorporating short/medium/long term goals and actions within the area. It will be used to guide discussions on how to reduce visibility of drug related public nuisance, improve public perceptions of safety in the area and provide comprehensive, safe, effective and appropriate treatment services within a series of short, medium and long-term strategies.

Dublin:Strategic Response Group, 2012. 187p.

By The UK Drug Policy Commission

Over the past ten years, UK drug strategies have increasingly focused on providing treatment and support services for drug-dependent offenders – who commit a disproportionate number of acquisitive crimes (e.g. shoplifting and burglary) – as a way of reducing overall crime levels. This criminal justice focus has been reinforced in the recent 2008 UK drug strategy (new Welsh and Scottish drug strategies are also being developed). The UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC) has analysed the evidence for the effectiveness of these initiatives for reducing drug use and reoffending and of the wider impact of this more prominent criminal justice approach. To inform our analysis we commissioned an independent review of the published evidence from leading researchers at the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR), King’s College London. We also listened to policy experts, local commissioners, drug workers and current and ex-drug users.

London: The UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC), 2008. 80p.

By The UK Drug Policy Commission

In this report, UKDPC proposes a radical rethink of how we structure our response to drug problems. It analyses the evidence for how policies and interventions could be improved, with recommendations for policymakers and practitioners to address the new and established challenges associated with drug use.

London: The UK Drug Policy Commission, 2012.173p.

By Dennis Earl Hoffman

According to the Elliot Ness myth, which has been widely disseminated through books, television shows, and movies, Ness and the Untouchables defeated Al Capone by marshaling superior firepower. In Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders, Dennis Hoffman presents a fresh new perspective on the downfall of Al Capone. To debunk the Eliot Ness myth, he shows how a handful of private citizens brought Capone to justice by outsmarting him rather than by outgunning him.

Drawing on previously untapped sources, Hoffman dissects what he terms a “private war” against Capone. He traces the behind-the-scenes work of a few prominent Chicago businessmen from their successful lobbying of presidents Coolidge and Hoover on behalf of federal intervention to the trial, sentencing, and punishment of Al Capone. Hoffman also reconstructs in detail a number of privately sponsored citizen initiatives directed at stopping Capone. These private ventures included prosecuting the gangsters responsible for election crimes; establishing a crime lab to assist in gangbusting; underwriting the costs of the investigation of the Jake Lingle murder; stigmatizing Capone; and protecting the star witnesses for the prosecution in Al Capone’s income tax evasion case.

Hoffman suggests that as American society continues to be threatened by illegal drugs, gangs, and widespread violence, it is important to remember that the organized crime and political corruption of Prohibition-era Chicago were checked through the efforts of private citizens.

Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 205p.

By Celina Realuyo

The illicit drug trade in the Americas has been evolving and expanding from plant-based narcotics like cocaine, heroin and marijuana to potent synthetic substances like fentanyl and methamphetamine. Since the 1980’s, the U.S. war on drugs focused on countering cocaine trafficking that made the Colombian and Mexican cartels immensely wealthy and powerful. Over the past decade, U.S. narcotic consumption has shifted significantly from cocaine to opioids and methamphetamine, resulting in an unprecedented opioid epidemic with 72,037 drug overdose deaths recorded in 2017 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, Mexican cartels are increasingly trafficking opioids and synthetics to respond to market changes in the U.S. The atomization of large cartels and increased competition to dominate trafficking routes resulted in record levels of violence in Mexico with 29,111 homicides registered in 2018. The October 17, 2019 failed Mexican government operation to capture one of El Chapo Guzman’s sons demonstrated how the Sinaloa cartel outgunned Mexican security forces and terrorized the city of Culiacan for hours. This paper will examine the evolving drug trade across the Americas from plant-based to synthetic drugs, the role of the Darknet as a force multiplier for the narcotics market, and U.S. and Mexican national and international efforts to address the dynamic drug trade and associated violence. Narcotics trafficking continues to be the most lucrative illicit activity in the world and is increasingly adapting and leveraging cyberspace. Drug demand changes are impacting the U.S. and Mexican security in different but equally concerning ways. As cocaine production in Colombia reaches its highest levels in history consumption in the U.S. is falling. As a result, cocaine traffickers are seeking new markets as far as Asia and Europe. Meanwhile, heroin use in the U.S. has spread across suburban and rural communities and socioeconomic classes with over 90% of heroin in the U.S. originating from Mexico. Potent synthetic opioids like fentanyl have become more prevalent and popular in the U.S. resulting in the tragic opioid crisis. Mexican cartels are increasingly involved in heroin, fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking into the U.S. and becoming more formidable. The U.S. and Mexico need to better understand this shift in narcotics demand and the corresponding modifications in the production, marketing, distribution and consumption aspects of drug trafficking. As narcotic offerings diversify and the Internet plays a more critical role in drug trafficking, these changes are affecting public health and security in the U.S. and Mexico. Both governments must strive to design timely responses to reduce demand, increase treatment, and improve supply reduction strategies through increased interagency and international cooperation as narcotics trafficking has increasingly adapted to new trends and enforcement efforts.

Washington, DC: Wilson Center, Mexico Institute, 2020. 16p.

By Steven S. Dudley

The U.S. Government estimates that 90 percent of the illicit drugs entering its borders passes through the Central American Isthmus and Mexico. Of this, close to half goes through Central America.1 Functioning as a transshipment point has had devastating consequences for Central America, including spikes in violent crime, drug use and the corroding of government institutions. Mexico receives most of the media attention and the bulk of U.S. aid, but the Northern Triangle – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras – have combined murder rates roughly double that of Mexico. While Mexico is having some limited success dealing with its spiraling conflict, vulnerable States in Central America are struggling to keep the organized criminal groups at bay, even while they face other challenges such as widespread gang activity. U.S. and Mexican efforts to combat the drug cartels in Mexico seem to have exacerbated the problems for Central America, evidenced by ever increasing homicide rates. 2 “As Mexico and Colombia continue to apply pressure on drug traffickers, the countries of Central America are increasingly targeted for trafficking, which is creating serious challenges for the region,” the State Department says in its recently released narcotics control strategy report.3 Problems are particularly acute in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, three States with vast coastlines, large ungoverned spaces and the greatest proximity to Mexico. However, geography is only part of the problem. Armed conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador and parts of Honduras between 1960 and the mid-1990s laid the foundations for the weapons trafficking, money laundering and contraband traffic that we are witnessing today. Peace accords in Guatemala and El Salvador, and police and military reform, only partially resolved deep-seeded socio-economic and security issues, and, in some cases, may have accelerated a process by which drug traffickers could penetrate relatively new, untested government institutions. Despite the gravity of the problem, Central America has had little regional or international cooperation to combat it. Examples of cross-border investigations are few. Communication between law enforcement is still mostly done on an ad-hoc basis. Efforts to create a centralized crime database have failed. Local officials are equally frustrated by the lack of international engagement and policies that often undermine their ability to control crime, especially as it relates to alleged gang members.

Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars; Trans-Border Institute, San Diego: University of San Diego; 2010. 30p.

By Francesco Calderoni

Just a few months after the entry into force of the EU Framework Decision on the fight against organized crime, this book provides an unprecedented analysis of the national and European legislation on organized crime. The book provides a critical examination of the European policies and legal instruments to promote the harmonization and approximation of criminal law in this field (including the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime). The current level of harmonization among EU Member States and the approximation to the standards of the new Framework Decision are discussed in detail, with the help of tables, graphs and maps.The results highlight the problems surrounding the international legal instruments and the inconsistencies of the national approaches to combating organized crime.

Heidelberg; Dordrecht; London' New York: Springer, 2010. 201p.

By Angel Rabasa, Christopher M. Schnaubelt, Peter Chalk, Douglas Farah, Gregory Midgette, Howard J. Shatz

In July 2011, President Barack Obama promulgated the Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime. In the letter presenting the strategy, the president stated that the expanding size, scope, and influence of transnational organized crime and its impact on U.S. and international security and governance represent one of the most significant challenges of the 21st century. Through an analysis of transnational criminal networks originating in South America, this report develops a more refined understanding of the operational characteristics of these networks; the strategic alliances that they have established with state and other nonstate actors; and the multiple threats that they pose to U.S. interests and to the stability of the countries where they operate. It identifies U.S. government policies and programs to counter these networks; the roles of the Department of Defense, the geographic combatant commands, component commands, and task forces; and examines how U.S. Army assets and capabilities can contribute to U.S. government efforts to counter these networks. The report also recommends reconsidering the way in which nontraditional national security threats are classified; updating statutory authorities; providing adequate budgets for the counternetwork mission; and improving interagency coordination.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2017. 214p.

Edited by R. Forte

The policy paper (ed. Forte, R., Sapucca, 2013) offers a description of the situation of organized crime in the Western Balkans in general and in individual countries - Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro - as well as a focus on the recent legislation on the recovery and management of criminal assets in Bulgaria, used as a term of confrontation with the consolidated approach applied in Italy to such issues. It offers as well a feasibility analysis on the extension of the model to the Western Balkans.

Sofia, Bulgaria: Center for the Study of Democracy, 2013. 88p.

By United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and testing public healthcare systems to a breaking point. Many areas of economic activity have either been shut down by governments to halt the spread of the virus or have seen demand collapse. In many countries where organized criminal groups are prevalent, struggling private businesses – many unable to access enough public funds to keep them afloat – are more likely to seek out loans on the illicit market than they would be at other times. Businesses in the transport, hospitality, arts, retail, and beauty sectors are particularly vulnerable to infiltration by organized criminal groups (OCGs). As these businesses begin to reopen, some will find themselves either in the debt of OCGs, or directly controlled by them. The OCGs can seize control either through exchange of money for buying shares or by directly taking over operations. This generates more opportunities for criminal activity, including money laundering and trafficking activities, enabling OCGs to further expand their control and power over the licit economy.

Vienna: UNODC, 2020. 37p.

By Marco Dugato, Marco De Simoni and Ernesto U. Savona

This working paper aims at developing and testing a methodology for measuring Organized Crime (hereinafter OC) in a list of selected countries of the Latin American region. This study represents one of the first systematic attempts to obtain reliable and comparable measurement of OC presence and threats in the region. The outcomes will provide a more comprehensive view on how to measure and to analyze OC today in Latin America, taking into account the regional specificities of this phenomenon. Moreover, creating a valid measurement of OC has relevant policy implications, since valid indicators may improve the effectiveness of government and enforcement actions.

Milan: TRANSCRIME, 2014. 53p.

By National Research Council.

Tobacco use has declined because of measures such as high taxes on tobacco products and bans on advertising, but worldwide there are still more than one billion people who regularly use tobacco, including many who purchase products illicitly. By contrast to many other commodities, taxes comprise a substantial portion of the retail price of cigarettes in the United States and most other nations. Large tax differentials between jurisdictions increase incentives for participation in existing illicit tobacco markets. In the United States, the illicit tobacco market consists mostly of bootlegging from low-tax states to high-tax states and is less affected by large-scale smuggling or illegal production as in other countries. In the future, nonprice regulation of cigarettes - such as product design, formulation, and packaging - could in principle, contribute to the development of new types of illicit tobacco markets.

Understanding the U.S. Illicit Tobacco Market reviews the nature of illicit tobacco markets, evidence for policy effects, and variations among different countries with a focus on implications for the United States. This report estimates the portion of the total U.S. tobacco market represented by illicit sales has grown in recent years and is now between 8.5 percent and 21 percent. This represents between 1.24 to 2.91 billion packs of cigarettes annually and between $2.95 billion and $6.92 billion in lost gross state and local tax revenues.

Understanding the U.S. Illicit Tobacco Market describes the complex system associated with illicit tobacco use by exploring some of the key features of that market - the cigarette supply chain, illicit procurement schemes, the major actors in the illicit trade, and the characteristics of users of illicit tobacco. This report draws on domestic and international experiences with the illicit tobacco trade to identify a range of possible policy and enforcement interventions by the U.S. federal government and/or states and localities.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2015. 240p.

By Hernando Zuleta González

The increase in the area cultivated with coca in Colombia has cast doubt on the country’s anti-drug strategy and has encouraged skepticism about the possibility of a complete and definitive peace. Furthermore, this perception of failure has given rise to policy proposals based on the idea that illicit crops are a criminal issue, not a development one. This paper is a complete review of the available evidence and aims at organizing the information related to this debate and shedding light on the convenience or inconvenience of certain policies. There are six highly relevant facts: (i) With respect to reducing cocaine supply, the efforts in seizures and destruction of infrastructure are more efficient than the efforts in eradication. (ii) Seizures and destruction of infrastructure may help in reducing coca plantations. (iii) There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the consumption of cocaine in Colombia has increased. (iv) Most regions of the country have seen a decrease in the amount of coca crops. However, at least one armed group is present in the regions where the cultivated area has increased. (v) Coca growing municipalities are, on average, poorer than the rest of the country. These municipalities have a low tax revenue, and reduced levels of connectivity and institutional development. (vi) The increase in the consumption of cocaine in the United States is concentrated in a specific age group and in certain states. This fact makes it difficult to relate the increase in consumption to an exogenous increase in the supply.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2019. 40p.