Around 50 years ago, the Netherlands decriminalized cannabis for recreational use. This paper uses retrospective data on the ages at which individuals began and ceased cannabis use to reconstruct its prevalence in Amsterdam during the period surrounding the policy change. This approach enables a...

Patients in rural areas have higher rates of opioid use and overdose than those in urban areas that are linked to the greater prevalence and amounts of opioids prescribed. We merge individual claims data with county-level supply and demand factors to examine this relationship between...

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...

This paper examines how firms in an emerging economy are affected by violence due to drug trafficking. Employing rich longitudinal plant-level data covering all of Mexico from 2005–2010, and using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous spatiotemporal variation in...

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...

Die Bundesregierung hat einen Gesetzentwurf zur Legalisierung des "kontrollierten Umgangs mit Cannabis" vorgelegt. Das Gesetz regelt die Zulassung des privaten Konsums mit privatem Eigenanbau und in Form von Anbauvereinigungen. Ein weiterer Gesetzentwurf soll bis Jahresende folgen und einen...

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...

Considerable resources have been spent on estimating the size of populations of people who use drugs (PWUD) and people who inject drugs (PWID) in Africa. Precise estimates are elusive, not least because of stigma and criminalization faced by these populations. Bio-behavioral surveys focused on...

Evidence on cannabis legalization's effects on mental health remains scarce, despite both rapid increases in cannabis use and an ongoing mental health crisis in the United States. We use granular geographic data to estimate medical cannabis dispensary availability's effects on self-reported...

Despite the fact that 30 percent of opioid overdoses also involve a benzodiazepine, there is little policy guidance on how to curb concurrent misuse and even less evidence on how changes to co-prescribing practices can affect patients' economic trajectories. In 2012, Austria restricted access to...

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...

Despite the fact that 30 percent of opioid overdoses also involve a benzodiazepine, there is little policy guidance on how to curb concurrent misuse and even less evidence on how changes to co-prescribing practices can affect patients' economic trajectories. In 2012, Austria restricted access to...

The onset of the war on drugs in Mexico at the beginning of 21st century had far-reaching effects on its citizens, including most obviously, an unprecedented increase in the homicide rate. We analyse the correlation between violence on social capital in the 32 federal states of Mexico from...

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...

This study investigates the effect of individual health conditions on individual innovation output, utilizing the staggered passage of recreational marijuana policies as an exogenous shock. Employing a large and current sample of U.S. inventors from 2010 to 2018, our study identifies a...

The legalization of cannabis in the United States has focused on creating regulated, for-profit commercial markets modeled on alcohol to replace the prohibition regime that held sway for most of the 20th century. Like the fabled gold rush of the 19th century, this new market opportunity has been...

Drug consumption rooms (DCRs) are fixed or mobile spaces in which people who use drugs are provided with sterile drug use equipment and can use illicit drugs under the supervision of trained staff. They exist in several European countries, Australia, Canada, Mexico and the USA, and are usually...

This report describes the methods and findings of systematic reviews of the literature undertaken to update the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) 2011 joint guidance on 'Prevention and control of...

EU Drug Market: Amphetamine describes the European amphetamine market from production and trafficking, to distribution and use. It details the processes, materials and actors involved at different stages and levels of the market. Taking a threat assessment approach, the module identifies key...

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 aim of this study was to explore Canada's image as a cannabis tourism destination and investigate how tourists' motivations, perceived risks, and travel constraints affect their intentions to visit Canada for leisure cannabis consumption. By examining the image formation process from a...

We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country's most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an in-person survey to nearly 3,000 urban youths,...

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....

The increase in the global demand for avocados has attracted the attention of rent-seeking criminal organizations in Mexico. As a result, farmers and packing houses have become targets of drug cartels. This paper investigates whether declining drug revenues have motivated cartels to target licit...