Medical marijuana laws generate significant policy debates regarding drug policy. In particular, if marijuana is a complement or a gateway drug to hard drugs, these laws would increase not only the usage of marijuana but hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. In this paper, I empirically study...

Considering the illegal markets in the European Union member states, the valences of drug trafficking get more and more worrisome, both of the proliferation level, and the size of the financial transactions, the European markets being the most profitable in terms of heroin and cocaine...

Our 2007–2009 ethnography describes and analyses the practice of harm reduction in a heroin users’ group in the midwestern United States. While dominant addiction interventions conceptualize the addict as powerless – either through moral or physical weakness – this group contested such...

Globalizing processes have profoundly shaped the European drugs situation. The illegal drug markets have reached to evolve and to transform all the advantages of this phenomenon, in their favor. Based on globalization aspects, the paper purpose is to present the main characteristics of illicit...

The dramatic increase of poppy cultivation and opium production in Afghanistan has led to a serious drug addiction problem in te world. The rising heroin use, because of needle sharing, may lead to a much higher incidence of HIV infection and AIDS in Afghanistan in the future. We organized two...

Globalization has led to an increase in commercial activities running on the illegal markets, its dynamics being largely determined by the balance between profitability and the major risks involved. Revenues are significant, one example being those obtained from drug industry. In recent years,...

As of 1987, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) has imposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers based on the quantity of the drug involved regardless of its purity. Using the STRIDE dataset on drug arrests and a differences-in-differences approach, I find that this led to an increase in...

An important question for policy makers is how drug users may respond to changes in economic factors. Based on a unique data set of almost 2,500 interviews with people attending a needle exchange service in Oslo, this paper aims at estimating the impact of economic factors on heroin and...

This study investigates trajectories of heroin use and subsequent consequences in a sample of 471 male heroin addicts who were admitted to the California Civil Addict Program in 1964-1965 and followed over 33 years. Applying a two-part growth mixture modeling strategy to heroin use level during...

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) STRIDE data contain records of acquisitions of illegal drugs by undercover agents and informants of the DEA and Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia. These data are widely used in economic analyses of markets for illegal drugs....

Illicit market activities are associated with considerable financial and psychological harms for drug users and third parties, and impose significant demands on public services. Since policy interventions interact with the market, evaluations of cost-effectiveness necessitate knowledge of how...

Using a unique data set of almost 2,500 interviews with people attending a needle exchange service in Oslo, this paper sets out to estimate the impact of economic factors on heroin and amphetamine injectors’ drug consumption, including cross-price effects. To examine the robustness of the...

Three key features of the retail trade for illicit drugs are documented: moral hazard, repeated interactions and price dispersion. An interpretation of this evidence based on search and informational frictions is presented. Various policy implications of the suggested interpretation are discussed.