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This chapter introduces the core arguments and narrative of the book, and how drugs produced in Afghanistan were initially embraced by a series of Afghan rulers, legally or not, as a vehicle to grow the Afghan economy. Over time, particularly because of American influence, Afghan rulers adopted more stringent forms of drug control. This books reveals that Afghan rulers adopted the prohibition of drugs to foster better diplomatic relations with the US to help build the Afghan state, but at the expense of Afghans who were increasingly dependent on the drug trade. The illicit drug trade emerged, not simply because of a failed state, but rather, in reaction to the abandonment of the legal opium trade and the gradual adoption of more coercive forms of drug control.

This chapter discusses the characteristics of the wholesale heroin market by examining some of the major drug trafficking cases between Burma and China since the mid-1980s. It takes an in-depth look at the rise and fall of a heroin kingpin, Tan Xiaolin, and mid-level heroin traffickers, Jiang Jiatian and Yang Jufen. It examines the role of southern China in wholesale drug trafficking, especially Guangdong and its vicinity. It concludes that the Chinese high-level drug market is very similar to the high-level drug trades in the United States, the Great Britain, and Canada, but very different from those in Mexico and Colombia, especially in terms of monopoly, violence, and corruption. Drug markets in countries like the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and China, under strict enforcement, tend to be small, nonhierarchical, poorly organized, with less violence and corruption, and exist on the margins of society. In lax enforcement countries such as Mexico and Colombia, drug trafficking organizations tend to be larger, better organized, more likely to use violence and corruption. Members of these organizations “can lead very comfortable lives, publicly enjoying their wealth and circulating in high society in the company of high level politicians.”

This chapter discusses the rise of entrepreneurial traffickers (both upper-and lower-level) in the Chinese drug market. First, it examines the relationship between organized crime groups and drug trafficking and distribution. It then moves on to the social organization of the drug trade by exploring issues such as fragmented trafficking process, hierarchy and division of labor, mobility within the drug trade, and self-preservation measures. It finds that China’s heroin trade consists mostly of highly fragmented stages and mutually isolated groups of entrepreneurs. In fact, all traffickers were involved in particular segments or specific stages of the drug trade, picking up their consignment at one point and moving it to the next. There were no organizations or traffickers that operated in multiple markets or exerted influence beyond their point of delivery. This is not to say that drug trafficking is not organized or coordinated among these entrepreneurs. Careful planning and execution are fundamental to operational success; and redundancy is kept to a minimum since every task is carried out by “trusted” partners. However, such organized behavior should not be confused with the concept of a formal organization, which implies operational regularity and existential continuity.

This chapter examines the role of western tourists and hippies in globalizing Afghanistan’s illicit drug trade. Throughout the 1960s, thousands of westerners flocked to Afghanistan to buy and consume hash. This chapter shows that by the 1970s the growing demand for hashish in western markets led to a greater influx of drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was ideal for those involved in the illicit drug trade, because of its cheap and abundant supply, as well as the lax or ineffective enforcement of drug laws. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates that the hash trade was critical in building the global trafficking networks that would later link western demand for opium and heroin with producers and traders in Afghanistan.

This chapter examines the history, development, and patterns of drug production and trafficking in Burma and its border. First, it briefly discusses some of the major political and economic developments in Burma and China over the past two decades, and explains how these developments affected the drug trade in these two countries, as well as Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. It then moves on to the drug trade in Burma, focusing on the three areas that are the centers of the drug business: Shan State, Mandalay City, and Rangoon City. It gives special attention to Shan State, which borders Thailand in the south and China in the north, because of its unique geopolitical location. For Mandalay and Rangoon, the chapter focuses on the recent movement of Yunnanese (Chinese from Yunnan Province) from the border areas to these cities and how the influx of Yunnanese has brought Mandalay and Rangoon closer to drug producers and traffickers along the border areas. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the characteristics of the Burmese drug market.

This chapter examines the social organization of street-level heroin distribution in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. The focus is on Kunming not only because it is the heroin capital of China, but also because the research project was conducted with the participation of researchers from a police college located there. Based on in-depth interviews with 39 heroin retailers in Kunming, the chapter explores the individual characteristics of street-level heroin dealers, the reasons for their engagement in heroin retail, and the modus operandi of street-level heroin distribution in Kunming. It also discusses maima (literally “selling horses” or snitching)—the most prevalent method used by drug enforcers to go after heroin retailers, and what these retailers usually do to protect themselves from being arrested by the authorities.

This chapter examines women’s participation in drug trafficking and street drug dealings in Yunnan, China, to understand how women have played a role in gaining and maintaining market positions in this illicit business. Drawing on data from a survey of 297 convicted female inmates and in-depth interviews with more than a dozen active female drug dealers in the community, it proposes a niche market perspective for understanding women’s participation in this illicit enterprise. Unlike other traditional enterprises, women were not simply relegated to invisible margins, but instead were present in many levels of the drug trade. In most cases, women worked for or with male partners, but they occasionally participated independently. Perhaps the most important feature of the drug trade along the border between Yunnan and Burma that shapes women’s participation is the absence of violence.

This chapter begins by discussing that in the recent past, numerous associations bind Antioquian people together across class, promoted either by individual initiative, by the Church, or by the government. It then explains that the dynamism and positive outlook of Antioquia, mirrored in the proliferation of these societies, coincided with the economic expansion of the region. It adds that by the 1920s, the region was the busiest economic nucleus in Colombia, and led the modernisation of the country. It notes that sociability did not abolish class distinctions. It argues that even after facing years of threats posed by the drugs trade and the growth of guerrilla and paramilitary numbers and activity, the Antioquian society demonstrated the degree of resistance and even the capacity to recover. It suggests that the region’s past has played a more important role than is now conventionally accepted in responding to challenges posed by recent difficulties.

Allen Jones began his last year at Clark Junior High in an optimistic mood. He was in the band and orchestra, he tried out and made the school basketball team in the beginning of his ninth-grade year. He started to get some serious playing experience. Nate Archibald took them to a citywide basketball tournament in the park right across the street from the Forest Projects on Caldwell Avenue and 163rd Street, where Hilton White ran a legendary basketball program. About this time, the drug trade around the Projects started to change. There was a party almost every weekend in one of the Projects around the neighborhood: in the Melrose Projects on 156th Street off Morris Avenue, the Mitchell Projects, or the Millbrook Projects. It was at one of those parties in the Millbrook Projects that he became involved in yet another incident that could have cost him his life.

This chapter discusses how authorities in China are combating the drug trade. It focuses on measures adopted by the Chinese authorities, especially community mobilization, harsh punishment, and the professionalization of the drug enforcement police force. It also examines how Chinese officials are working with authorities from the United States, Burma, and Hong Kong to stem the flow of drugs across international borders. It finds that despite meager budgets and poor equipment, Chinese law enforcement agencies have been striving to gain an upper hand in their war against drugs. China’s struggle against illicit drugs will remain an uphill battle in the foreseeable future, considering the country’s growing wealth and urbanization, and adding to the mix poor neighboring countries with a long history of opium cultivation and a weak government. China will have few choices but to increase its investment in building drug enforcement infrastructure and training its police forces.

This chapter analyses the two-way linkages between insurgency and economic development. The various channels through which one influences the other have been examined. It is observed that (in)security and (under)development are positively linked. It also analyses the negative impact of insurgency on human security in the NER. It explains how the cycles of violence interlocking with economic underdevelopment have drawn the societies of the NER into a conflict trap where they are caught in a vicious circle of violence and underdevelopment.

This chapter focuses on low-level drug traffickers. Using a survey of 578 convicted drug traffickers inside a Chinese prison and in-depth interviews with a small number of drug inmates, it examines the individual and group characteristics of these convicted drug traffickers. It explores what they were convicted for, what were their sentences, and how they entered the drug business in the first place. It also analyzes one particular method of drug trafficking between Burma and China, the “ants-moving-house” method. In response to law enforcement crackdowns on large-scale heroin trafficking activities and to take advantage of the strong supply of willing risk takers, many traffickers in China move only small quantities of heroin by mule. The chapter discusses what the routes are, where and how mules are recruited, and the social organization of this particular method of heroin trafficking.

This chapter opens with a description of the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s major opium-cultivation and heroin-producing areas, covering a 150,000-square-mile, mountainous area located where the borders of Burma (or Myanmar), Laos, and Thailand meet. It goes on to describe China’s booming drug trafficking business. It then sets out the main theoretical interest of this study, which was geared mostly toward understanding how individuals find one another in their social networks to gain entry into the drug trade, manage law enforcement risks and logistical obstacles inherent in the business, and collectively and individually move toward the common goal of making money. The remainder of the chapter discusses the research methods applied in the study, the limitations of the study, and the generalizability of study findings.

This chapter discusses how changes in the global drug market have eroded the links between traditional criminal territories and the cultures they spawned. Women exemplify these changes to criminal economies and cultures. Via the adoption of mainstream commercial methodologies, female dealers symbolize the breaking-down of taken-for-granted underworld orthodoxies; and the clusters of friends, acquaintances, and families who contrive the dealing networks of the contemporary drug trade do not exclude women. Female engagement within dealing cultures enables a measure of status that had traditionally been denied to women, suggesting that crime networks are altering in accordance with the socio-economic environments that host them.

This chapter details the connections between the contemporary drug trade and the historical antecedents analyzed in the previous chapters. It discusses how opium became an essential component of the war economy, and how many of the same problems that plagued counter-narcotics operations in previous decades continued to plague Afghanistan during the regimes of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. Ultimately, the chapter examines how illicit drug production is intimately tied to issues of governance in Afghanistan, and how cornerstones of counter-narcotics operations, particularly interdiction and crop eradications, do little to improve governance, and instead, perpetuate the illicit drug trade, while reinforcing the legitimacy of anti-state groups, like the Taliban. To echo a recurring theme of the book, drug control was, and still is, deeply problematic and ineffective in Afghanistan.

For many years, Mexico has had to deal with an illicit drug economy and the extreme violence associated with it. The biggest changes in the country's drug trade occurred in the early 1980s, when cocaine flows from the Caribbean were rerouted toward Mexico. As a result, the value and thus the corrupting power of the market for illicit drugs radically increased. The history of drug trafficking in Mexico can be divided into three main periods: the emergence of a local illicit drug economy, followed by the emergence of a centrally regulated illicit market and the eventual transition to a privatized and increasingly violent drug economy. This chapter explores the emergence and evolution of the illicit drug market in Mexico, focusing on the factors that change the relations underlying illicit markets. It then looks at some of the main arguments on how illicit drug markets give rise to violence before concluding with a discussion on the dynamics of violence in an effort to highlight the dilemmas currently faced by Mexican authorities.

In the next two chapters, the authors focus on the most marginalized fathers in the study. While it is apparent that prisons have become institutions for warehousing the most marginalized populations, public housing developments in the 1970s and after provided a similar institutional mechanism—they became depositories for the poorest families in urban America. A little less than one-fourth of the men in this study spent some of their childhood growing up in public housing, and nearly all of them were racial minorities (93 percent). Further, nearly three-quarters of this group were either locked up or unemployed at the time of the interview. This does not include fathers who grew up in surrounding neighborhoods, many of whom had similar reputations as the “PJs” themselves. It is in these urban spaces that fathers became exposed to the drug trade, robberies, and structural and interpersonal violence, and it is here where they became fathers.