Inventory of counterfeit drugs, history of antibiotics and presentation of the ministry in charge with four of the largest public health centers in Niger using them in 2016-2017

Context: Counterfeit medicine is a substance capable of curing a living, which is made fraudulently without responding to WHO standards. Today, the population Street increasingly to illicit markets to buy drugs at lower cost to the sellers. So, the sale of counterfeit medicines has first become the problem that tempts the media. Those drug supply have become not only a threat to the health of the population but also to the economy and security of many countries including in Niger. The street drug trade is a very growing activity in Niger. Antibiotic is a drug which treats infectious bacterial diseases. Associated with vaccination, it eliminates or greatly reduces the main epidemic diseases. Evidence: Surveys on the use of drugs and in particular antibiotics have been carried out. The people targeted are those of the Ministry of Public Health, health workers stationed in hospitals and referral health centers; pharmacists and drugstore vendors, street vendors. Results: The presentation of Ministry of Public Health in charge of health belonging to 4 greatest health centers were recorded as being used by the Nigerien population to have the most commonly antibiotics used by them. The βeta-lactam family (Amoxicillin, Ampicillin and Cloxacillin) (60/100); the Fluoro-quinolones family (ciprofloxacin) (20/100); the imidazole family (Metronidazol) (20/100) were the most used species. Conclusion: The review on counterfeit drugs, the history of antibiotics and the presentation of the main health centers involved in Niger provided substantial details on the use of drugs to treat infectious diseases. These complete basic data could certainly encourage some researchers to undertake research on other molecules which could lead to the quality control of these drugs for the treatment of the diseases which concern them and to have notions on the functioning of the services concerned by approaching these latter.

European illegal puppy trade and organised crime

Organised crime groups’ involvement in illicit markets is a common focus of law enforcement and governments. Drug, weapon, human and wildlife trafficking (and others) are all illegal activities with link to organised crime. This paper explores the overlooked illicit market of puppies. We detail the state of knowledge about the organisation of the UK puppy trade, which includes irresponsible and illegal breeding of puppies throughout Europe and their often-illegal movement into the UK. In 2017, we conducted an analysis of hundreds of online advertisements in Scotland, 12 expert interviews, a stakeholder survey of 53 participants, and 40 focus groups across Great Britain. Our data suggest an organised illicit market running in parallel to the legal trade. We speculate as to whether at some point along the supply chain organised crime groups are responsible for the suffering and death of the puppies and the economic and emotional damage to ‘consumers’. Online monitoring and physical scrutiny at the ports must be improved to reduce non-human animal abuse. People buying puppies must also be made aware that their purchase could be profiting organised crime.

Connections between trades and trafficking in wildlife and drugs

Whilst drug trafficking has been a concern for several decades, wildlife trafficking has only fairly recently garnered international attention. Often media coverage of wildlife trafficking links it to the illegal trade of drugs. This article analyses wildlife and drug trafficking connections of various kinds. The purpose is to reveal the overlaps and synergies of wildlife and drug trafficking, providing concrete examples of where these markets co-exist as well as intertwine based on literature and original fieldwork. It explores the question of ‘Why in some cases, an illicit market remains focused on a single commodity, whilst in others it accommodates a combination of illicit commodities?’ This study identifies different types of wildlife-drugs linkages, including combined contraband, camouflage, multiple trade lines, shared smuggling routes and transportation methods, barter trade, and laundering drug money. The article shows that illicit markets are complex and the examples of activities and transactions that are provided illuminate some of the different dimensions of converging and diverging trades involving wildlife and drugs.

Facilitating Irregular Migration into Malaysia and from Indonesia: Illicit Markets, Endemic Corruption and Symbolic Attempts to Overcome Impunity

Discourses around illicit markets for irregular migration focus on criminality and global dimensions threatening border security and the sovereignty of the state. Organised crime has generally been understood to be committed by crime syndicates outside or parallel to the dominant order and formal economy. In Malaysia and Indonesia, however, the state (or parts thereof) is heavily implicated in such crime and essential for the success of unsanctioned trans-border movements. The participation of state officials could be analysed as a convergence of extralegal income generation and symbolic law enforcement. This article presents case studies from Malaysia and Indonesia that could only have taken place because security officials facilitated them. It challenges the orthodoxy of a state versus criminal network opposition and seeks to explain the circumstances under which legal prosecution occurs. The symbolic punishment of low-ranking officials reinforces networks of control, power hierarchies and cooperation of the state in illicit markets.

Property rights’ emergence in illicit drug markets

Governance rules are efficient mechanisms in the sense that they increase people’s welfare. They emerge even when the state is unable or refuses to create and enforce them. We study a situation in which this demand for governance manifests itself through the emergence of property rights in illicit drug markets: a privately-provided governance. Specifically, we propose a model for property rights emergence in illicit drug markets as predicted by the theory on governance provided by prison gangs. It is studied a situation in which an agreement among criminals, resembling property rights enforceability on its allocative effect, can emerge in illicit drug markets. Our Mechanism Design approach shows that a change inside the prison system, from a competitive environment to the hegemony of a group of criminals, implies the equilibrium in illicit markets to shift from warfare to peace: the hegemonic group is shown to desire to promote the collusive agreement when it is able to do so. This contrasts with the equilibrium under no hegemony, in which the possibility to conquer consumers/territories drives violence up to a positive level. The novel empirical perspective implied by the model is explored using data from Brazil, a context for which the theory of governance provided by prison gangs has been pointed as a key explanation.

Victims and suspects of modern slavery: Identifying subgroups using latent class analysis

We explored heterogeneity (subgroups) amongst victims and suspects of modern slavery offences using a cross-sectional extract of police data from a large metropolitan area in the UK with details of 540 victims and 380 suspects (reported to the police between April 2015 and June 2018). Latent class analysis was used to identify subgroups of victims and suspects based on the manifest demographic (age, sex, and place of birth) and exploitation type variables. Amongst suspects, classes distinguished between ‘Male sex traffickers’ (82%) and ‘Labour and domestic traffickers’ (18%). Amongst victims, four classes were identified as: ‘Sexually and domestically exploited women’ (30%) and ‘Sexually exploited girls’ (35%), ‘Men exploited in licit and illicit markets’ (26%), and ‘Criminally exploited boys’ (9%). These findings reveal trafficking as structured by gender, generation, and migration, but caution against defining the problem as one of exclusively male offenders exploiting women and children victims, even while this is commonplace.

Illicit Trade and Smuggling

In this article, illicit trade and smuggling refer to the unauthorized sale, purchase, exchange, or transport of goods, persons, animals, or technology across borders. Illicit trade across borders may entail goods considered dangerous, those that circumvent prohibitions in one or both countries, or mundane items and population movements that evade controls or regulations. However, smuggled goods may be produced, consumed, or recirculated legally, informally, or illegally. Lacking a universal, global set of norms and regulations across time, much of what is considered to be illicit trade may be legal in one place while prohibited in another, or tolerated in one time and banned in another. The forms smuggling takes and its profitability are shaped by regulations, their inconsistent application, and their differences across different regulatory spheres. Illicit trade often dovetails with legal global trade; forms of integration from below may proceed alongside, compete with, resist, or even complement and foster legal global economic flows. Power relations, within countries and wielded by more powerful nations with influence to shape trade agreements, trade policies, financial norms, and global prohibition regimes, normalize the kinds of international trade considered legal and beneficial and foster the criminalization of competing alternatives. Yet, such norms are not necessarily widely shared or consistently applied and implemented. Individuals engaging in forms of illicit trade and smuggling may not share the perspective of states or international organizations regarding the morality and legitimacy of their actions. Scholars contend that perceptions of illicit trade risk perpetuating seeing like a state, making historical and comparative perspectives paramount. Not everything the state does is moral and not every aspect of illicit trade is amoral. This may pertain especially with respect to the marginalized; extra-legal trade may provide a mode of subsistence, and state regulations may be experienced as selective, predatory, and protective of elite privilege and prevailing arrangements of inequality. States have the power to determine what is legal or criminal in the first place. Yet critical perspectives also point to how states and elite actors may benefit not only from forms of corruption, but also from illicit trade more broadly such that illicit trade is constitutive of state power, bureaucratic expansion, and international norms. Debate persists regarding whether illicit markets stabilize, build, compete with, or destabilize governance arrangements. Scholars also disagree whether illicit trade has grown, facilitated by globalization, or whether perceptions of this rising threat are shaped more by questionable numbers, state/private interests, and changing prohibitions.

Organized Crime in Asia

The significance of Asia’s rising economy and emergent foreign trade provides a conducive climate for the proliferation of organized crime. A reflexive exploration of organized crime in the Asian context ought to address two interrelated issues. The first relates to the ontological and epistemological effort to delineating Asia as a region that is not simply demarcated from the West, but one that houses diverse socio-political archetypes within itself. This issue of framing nuanced Asian perspectives within a normative Western-centric paradigm is linked to the second issue that is, evaluating the status of criminology as a “theoretical science” whose efficacy lies in its universal applicability. The corpus of existing Asia-centric research has been met with methodological challenges in the form of a reductive western orientalist lens that obscures larger economic and social complexities behind an exoticised “Asian uniqueness.” Organized Crime (OC) in Asia is varied along the contours of geographical, sociological and cultural particularities, as well as the individual colonial legacies of the region’s societies. However, a particular commonality in the form of a symbiosis between syndicated criminals and state actors on either side of the law, the penetration of the underworld into seemingly aboveboard politics, and the consequent blurring of lines between licit and illicit markets has been identified. This is inextricably linked to the pernicious and prevalent problem of corruption and governance in many of the countries in Asia, a problem that has grown parallel to the exponential economic growth the continent has had witnessed since the 1990s. Easy market access and rising consumer demand underline the prominence of drug production and trafficking as well as the global trade in counterfeit goods within Asian OC. The region’s defining feature of housing diversified nations lends itself to a transnationally proliferated and dynamic drug-related crime (DROC) and counterfeit trading syndicates, with different countries producing and trafficking different and newer drugs, and counterfeit goods for varied markets. The global interconnectivity, afforded by the internet through the digitalisation of contemporary OCs, has compounded the problem where access to anonymous borderless markets and cryptocurrency transactions has facilitated the displacement of lucrative drug and counterfeit crimes both spatially and tactically, leading to the circumvention of traditional forms of social control. The lack of collaboration and coordination among the Asian countries in tackling the illicit trade points to an urgent need to develop a more efficacious international legal framework and effective collaborative enforcement modalities to combat OC. One area of concern is how increasingly transnational OC groups and activities have become an important means of financially supporting terrorist operations that continue to proliferate Asia, prompting a rethink of the existing conceptual framework of the crime-terror nexus.

International Drug Trafficking: Past, Present, and Prospective Trends

Since the early 20th century, the illegal drug trade has received increasing focus throughout the world. However, the use of mind-altering substances predates attempts to prohibit or regulate them. Early control efforts date back to the teachings of Mohammed in the Koran, though wider-scale control efforts did not occur until the 18th century. Since that time, both the production of mind-altering substances and their regulation or prohibition has been commonplace throughout the world. Several illicit markets exist in response to the ongoing demand. Four notable products are cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and synthetically produced, mind-altering substances that are sold predominantly to users in North America and Europe. The production, transportation, and usage of these substances are all impacted by the histories and geographies of the producer, intermediary, and user countries. Shifts in tolerance of certain substances; geopolitical events, such as war; international policy and policing initiatives, such as the implementation of the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 and improved means of detecting illicit payloads at international boarders; and changes in demand for specific products have all influenced how trafficking routes and the organizations that participate in the drug trade form and adapt. Regardless of these changes, one constant is that no aspect of the drug trade has ever been dominated by a single, monolithic organization; several illicit enterprises have historically come together to form the often supply global chains. In the 2011, the first darknet market, the Silk Road, emerged as a means by which some buyers and sellers could connect, thus potentially reducing the links of the supply chain. Ongoing changes in technology as well as shifts in the regulatory frameworks on controlled substances will impact illicit substances that are sold and how buyers and sellers interact, and will require innovated research strategies to evaluate their evolution.