Within a week of receiving training from the Dakar based African AIRCOP team the Joint Airport Interdiction Task Force at Niamey airport in Niger reported the arrest of a Guinea Bissau national. The courier, travelling from Monrovia was carrying 70 pellets with 1,241 grams of cocaine. According to the team leader the arrest was made…
High-ranking Venezuelan government officials are under investigation by US authorities suspected of playing a key role in a drug trafficking and money laundering criminal network. Three federal indictments opened window onto accusations of ties between Venezuelan military and law enforcement officers and Colombian narcotics traffickers, a connection that officials in Washington have long warned about…
In 2008 the British newspaper The Observer ran an article titled ‘How a tiny West African country became the world’s first narco state’. The unwelcome moniker gained popular currency for journalists reporting on Guinea Bissau at the beginning of the decade, but has fallen out of use since the current government came to power in…
A French soldier has reportedly been arrested while carrying 27kg of cocaine through an airport in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, about to board a military transport aircraft bound for Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport. A man has reportedly been arrested at Newark airport in New Jersey, USA, for attempting to smuggle cocaine from…
A paper published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a coalition of researchers, suggests that interventions by overseas donors against Islamist terrorists have contributed to, rather than contained, the instability and cycle of violence in Mali. Based on interviews with over 150 stakeholders in Mali and from the international community, “Fixing a Fractured…
Since stepping up activities in the Westerm hemisphere this year the Cocaine Route Programme is beginning to impact on trafficking routes. The AIRCOP component, implemented by UNODC in collaboration with the World Customs Organization (WCO) and INTERPOL, has established Joint Airport Interdiction Task Forces (JAITFs) at airports in Panama and the Dominican Republic. More JAITFs are…
The vast majority of cocaine users (80%) consumed cocaine less than 10 times in the last 12 months, at an average dose of 1/2gm. This raises questions about the medical risk and dangers assumed to go with the drug. Retail prices vary, with the highest prices per gram recorded in New Zealand and Australia, though…
A survey by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has found that London’s sewage contains the highest concentration of cocaine in Europe. According to the same survey, Britain also has the highest rate of cocaine use among young adults in Europe. 4.2% of people aged 15 – 34 admitted to having…
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…
