This week the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has released the European Drug Report (EDR) 2015. The report is the product of the established surveillance system that has evolved since 1995 and now incorporates data from 30 countries. The complexity involved in gathering, processing and analysing different information streams creates a…
Ross Ulbricht, the mercurial founder of ‘Silk Road’, what was once the biggest internet trading site for illicit drugs was sentenced to life imprisonment last week. The 31 year old Texan physics graduate rose to notoriety on the back of a site on the hidden “dark web” that became a trading mart for drugs and…
A sharp increase of seizures of multi-tonne cocaine loads on pleasure craft bound for Europe from the Eastern Caribbean testify to the increasing capacities of law enforcement agencies. On 23 May, Portuguese Polícia Judiciária searched a 24 metre long pleasure boat that had arrived at Faial island a couple of days before. Hidden inside a…
Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road marketplace on the dark web, through which more than US$200 million worth of drugs has been sold online, has been jailed for life in the United States. The Spanish police, in conjunction with the country’s navy, have seized almost 2 tonnes of cocaine headed from the Caribbean. Reportedly,…
Two highly regarded researchers in the study of drug trafficking and organized crime presented a radical analysis at last week’s conference of the International Society of the Study of Drug Policy in Ghent. Letizia Paoli (Univeristy of Leuven) and Victoria Greenfield (George Mason University) have a record of contributing to our understanding of drug markets…
