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This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about opiate production and heroin trafficking around the word. This book provides a comparative analysis of national experiences in trying to control international trafficking and analyzes systematically the effects of differences in the stringency of the enforcement of global production and trafficking prohibitions on the organization of the market, the behavior of its participants and society at large. The first part of this book reviews the historical development of the world opiate market, the second part explores market conditions in Afghanistan, Burma, India, Colombia, and Tajikistan and the final part proposes a theoretical model of effective illegality that may helps to explains a country's participation in the heroin trafficking.

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 gives an overview of the drug trade surrounding the seedless cannabis sativa—the marijuana plant used for the potent, high-grade Thai sticks. Such wares fetched a premium price on American soil, and their trade continued to addle the Nixon administration even in the face of a much larger threat—heroin trafficking. Given how limited a commodity this prime quality, perfectly dried and packaged Thai and Laotian pot was, in the 1970s it was a seller's market with no end in sight. Unlike other drugs whose distribution was tightly controlled at the upper levels by syndicates, the Thai marijuana trade was controlled only by the laws of supply and demand.