EU Drug Market: MDMA describes the European MDMA market from production to trafficking, distribution and use. It details the materials, processes and players involved at different stages and levels of the market. The module takes a threat assessment approach, identifying key issues and defining...

International cocaine trafficking from South America has increased significantly over the past decade. Based on mixed-methods research, we hypothesize that this change has been driven primarily by the globalization of its logistics, which has led to relevant technical and political changes along...

Efficient and interconnected logistics networks, like postal services, provide powerful tools for criminal groups to organize cross-border drug trafficking by exploiting legitimate infrastructure. Despite postal services becoming inadvertent facilitators in smuggling, focused research on this...

The European Drug Report 2025: Trends and Developments presents the EUDA's latest analysis of the drug situation in Europe. Focusing on illicit drug use, related harms and drug supply, the report provides a comprehensive set of national data across these themes, as well as on specialist drug...

African countries have been experiencing an upsurge in public health problems as a result of the increased availability and use of psychoactive substances trafficked into the continent and also produced locally. However, mounting effective policy and programme interventions have been impeded by...

This is a review of the 2023 IASOC Prize Winner Trying to Make It: The Enterprises, Gangs, and People of the American Drug Trade. By R.V. Gundur. Gundur offers a masterful account of the inner workings of the illicit drugs trade from the Mexico-US Border into the USA. His ethnography examines...

The European Drug Report 2024: Trends and Developments presents the EMCDDA's latest analysis of the drug situation in Europe. Focusing on illicit drug use, related harms and drug supply, the report provides a comprehensive set of national data across these themes, as well as on specialist drug...

EU Drug Market: Heroin and other opioids describes the European opioids market from production and trafficking to distribution and use. It details the processes, materials and players involved at various stages and levels of the market. The module takes a threat assessment approach, identifying...

The illicit drug trade generates billions of dollars and sustains transnational criminal organisations. Drug markets can destabilise governance and undermine development. Data indicate increasing drug use in South Africa. However, information on the size and value of the drug market is limited....

This article reassesses the book Africa and the War on Drugs (2012) and a related special journal issue (2016) in the light of drug market and policy developments since 2012. As part of this reassessment, we question some of the assumptions made in the book and special issue. More specifically,...

The production, distribution, and consumption of drugs has long been seen as a threat to social and economic development. On the other hand, conditions of unemployment and poverty foster expansion of illegal drug markets. In this study, I offer a nuanced view of the drugs/development connection...

I analyze the demand side impacts of a supply side intervention into the market for illegal drugs in what has been described as America's largest open air drug market. Beginning in 2018, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office and the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in an ambitious...

This paper takes a transdisciplinary genealogical approach to the current global lack availability of internationally controlled essential medicines in more than 80% of the world, with a particular focus on the Asia region. More than six decades after the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs...

As a post-Soviet, Muslim-majority, and secular state, Azerbaijan has historically stood at the intersection of European and Eastern influences. Among other geopolitical relations, this has affected the use, control, and production of psychoactive drugs, and eventually Azerbaijan's place in the...

Despite efforts to address the opioid crisis, opioid-related overdoses remain a significant contributor to mortality. State efforts to reduce overdose deaths by removing barriers to naloxone have recently focused on pharmacy channels, but the specifics of these laws and the contexts in which...

Recent studies have concluded that state laws legalizing medical marijuana can reduce deaths from opioid overdoses. Using data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a survey uniquely suited to assessing drug misuse, we examine the relationship between recreational marijuana laws...

We investigate behavioral responses to a staggered disruption in the supply of prescription opioids across U.S. states: the introduction of electronic Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs). Using administrative datasets, we find PDMPs curtail the proliferation of prescription opioids....

After the introduction of abuse-deterrent OxyContin in 2010, states with widespread extramedical OxyContin use experienced steep increases in heroin deaths, implying substitution from OxyContin to heroin. Leveraging cross-state variation in initial OxyContin utilization, we show the OxyContin...

This article reviews the chapter of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report (WDR) 2023 on 'The Nexus Between Drugs and Crimes that Affect the Environment and Convergent Crime in the Amazon Basin'. The WDR 2023 gathers the evidence on the multiple impacts of a...

This commentary explores the contradictory forces behind Lebanon’s implementation of drug control policies: opportunistic responses to international pressures on one hand, and an attempt to extract benefits from the industry on the other. This article argues that this logic results in...

This article identifies the early dictatorship of former President Ferdinand Marcos as a significant moment in drug policy in the Philippines, as well as the wider Southeast Asian region. Using methods of critical discourse analysis and the notion of episodic history, it shows how the Marcos...

This paper examines the rise and fall of the Administrative Bureau of Prohibited Drugs in 1920s Shanghai. It identifies the factors associated with the endeavours of the central government to experiment with establishing a Bureau dedicated to regulating refined drugs and the reasons why the...

The shadows of a drug paddler may soon be invisible on the street corner as they have moved to online drug marketplaces called 'cryptomarkets'. The criminogenic attributes of drug trafficking on cryptomarkets have attracted organized crime groups (OCGs) to make use of technology to further its...

The burden of illicit drug use and terrorism has become a significant health and social problem in many developing countries. Illicit drug use and terrorism have negatively affected the economy and development of some nations because the death rate due to these two phenomena is increasing daily,...