Drugs, Crime, and Corruption: Thinking the Unthinkable

Crimes generated by the drug world are rampant. A full half of all murders in the United States are drug-related. Each year, 30,000 Columbians die violent deaths, victims of the drug trade. Fifty percent of all burglaries in Britain are committed by addicts to pay for their habit. And in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Mafia-style gangs are quickly learning how lucrative the drug trade can be. In an attempt to expose the links between crime, drugs, corruption, and terrorism throughout the world, expert Richard Clutterbuck here provides a profile of drug use world-wide. Drawing on the dramatic examples of Peru and Columbia as case studies, the book describes in detail the manufacture and distribution of cocaine, crack, heroin, cannabis, speed, ice, and LSD.

Solutions exist, Clutterbuck argues, not in Latin America or Asia, but on the streets of the West. At a time when policies of suppression are faltering and when the War on Drugs has clearly failed, Clutterbuck weighs the pros and cons of the alternatives: What would need to be done to make suppression work? Should some drugs be decriminalized? How effective has the Dutch experiment been? Is the licensing of drugs to cure addictions an effective remedy?