NCJ Number
212560
Journal
Global Crime Volume: 6 Issue: 3&4 Dated: August-November 2004 Pages: 374-386
Date Published
August 2004
Length
13 pages
Annotation
This article explores how changes in international trade have affected the ways the drug trade has operated in recent years, becoming more differentiated and heterogeneous.
Abstract
During the last decade, business practices in trafficking have changed, as well as traffickers’ strategies in confronting law enforcement and the state. In the 1990s, wider changes in international trade affected the way the cocaine market had been organized. The lowering of transportation costs in combination with the proliferation of destinations, the increase in the volume of world trade, the integration of financial markets globally through modern electronic processes, and the use of fiscal havens and offshore banking have served both legal and illegal services. The drug industry is a very dynamic one, expanding its operations and exploring new markets, while constantly changing its organization, its business practices, the participating personnel, their social practices and relations, linkages with other sectors of civil society and the state, and the relationship towards networks of organized crime. The well-established drug trade organizations are disappearing with most new drug businesses being informal, small, mutating, and decentralized. The cocaine trade is a business in which many small low-profile traders quietly go their ways, refraining from any activity that may call attention to law enforcement. The field of cocaine production and trafficking has become more differentiated and the enterprises have become more heterogeneous. The new generation of traffickers are low profile, cautious, and organize the trade in an informal way. 38 Notes