Drug Trafficking: A North-South Perspective

Pradip Sarbadhikari is a political science professor at Lakehead
University in Thunder Bay.

“The quest for intoxication is an ancient and practically ubiquitous human pursuit,” writes Bernard Wood, Director of the North-South Institute in Ottawa, publishers of this little monograph. This quest has led to intolerable devastation of societies and individuals, hence the purpose of this book: to eliminate the sources of drugs.

The supply of drugs such as heroin, cannabis, and cocaine has to be cut at the source, and foreign aid has been used as a tool to encourage governments in Mexico, Turkey, and Thailand to help in stemming the trade in these drugs. But these efforts are useless unless they are combined with an understanding of the economic dependence of some Third World economies on the drug trade. Prepared from this perspective, the book is divided into three parts: Chapter 1 gives a historical overview of opium, cocaine, cannabis, and morphine; Chapter 2 deals with heroin addiction in North America and Western Europe; opiate trade; heroin trade in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; and cocaine, cannabis and hashish trade; Chapter 3 explores rural development, substitution crops and selected national programmes. There is a useful chronology of international accords and records of major U.N. agencies involved in the control of drug abuse.

These 94 pages make interesting and valuable reading both for those with some knowledge of the world drug scene and for the uninformed. The study, however, does not highlight some contemporary issues, such as the significance of the marketing and distributory drug structure in the United States; the circulation of funds in the United States (rather than in Colombia, Mexico, etc.); the comparative role of the American and South American Mafia, which is reaching new extremes (seen in the murder of Colombia’s Justice Minister and Mexican agents in Guadalajara); the importance of extradition treaties and other international agreements; and the birth of political parties supported by drug production (as in Colombia). Apart from these omissions, the monograph seems to miss the sense of outrage that the problem of drug abuse engenders. This is both a virtue and weakness of this little social science monograph. However, if the object of the book is to inform and to stimulate ideas, the dispassionate approach is effective.