Counter Narcotics

  • The Global Afghan Opium Trade: A Threat Assessment

    Heroin trafficking flows from Pakistan, 2009By the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, July 2011.

    Africa features prominently in the global heroin trade as a transshipment point and a significant consumer market. Traffic to and through the continent is dominated by Africans, who account for 50 percent of all drug arrests in Pakistan. Sharply higher traffic through African commercial air and seaports suggest a need for more robust customs regimes and stronger investigative and judicial follow through to better understand and frustrate smuggling networks. [PDF]

  • Cocaine and Instability in Africa: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean

    AfricaBriefFinal_5

    By Davin O'Regan. Africa Center for Strategic Studies, 2010.

    Africa is facing an increasingly menacing threat of cocaine trafficking that risks undermining its security structures, nascent democratic institutions, and development progress. Latin America has long faced similar challenges and its experience provides important lessons that can be applied before this expanding threat becomes more deeply entrenched on the continent - and costly to reverse. [ENGLISH] [FRENCH] [PORTUGUESE]

  • The Invisible Tide: Towards an International Strategy to Deal with Drug Trafficking Through West Africa

    hashishBy James Cockayne and Phil Williams.  International Peace Institute, 2009. Narcotics trafficking in West Africa threatens to destabilize the sub-region by corrupting its courts, barracks and other public offices.  The international community can help West Africa through the UN Peacebuilding Commission and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Meanwhile, ECOWAS should establish a Forum on West African Drug Trafficking to facilitate information-sharing and intra-regional coordination. [PDF]

  • West Africa's International Drug Trade

    Cocaine-onstory_1126276c West Africa's International Drug Trade. By Stephen Ellis. African Affairs, 2009. Recent large-scale hauls of Europe-bound cocaine in West Africa have prompted calls for enhanced counternarcotics efforts to stem a rising tide of destabilization. Yet sophisticated, resilient and effective West African organized crime syndicates have trafficked drugs globally for decades. Counternarcotics strategies face an entrenched threat to security rather than a new phenomenon.  [HTML]