Crime, organized

The British had two major conflicts with the Chinese over opium, in fact, they were called the Opium Wars in 1839 and 1856. These wars would force the Chinese to import opium to help control the population. The fact that opium, cocaine and their synthetic derivatives are illegal has only increased their value. In the same way that the Prohibition Act of the 1930 s allowed organized crime to get a great tax free start, the drug dealers of today have enormous sums of wealth to legitimately buy into any kind of business or government in the world. 

Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), The United Kingdom Threat Assessment of Serious Organized Crime, 2006/07. 

Increases in cocaine use, from 0.4 per cent (annual prevalence) in 2001 to 0.7 per cent in 2005, have been reported in household surveys conducted in Brazil. School surveys conducted in Brazil pointed to stable cocaine use over the 1997 - 2004 period.14 At the same time, there are reports of increasing activities of cocaine peddling gangs in the south-eastern states of the country and of the increasing exploitation of Brazil by international organized crime groups as a transit point for cocaine shipments from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru to Europe, often via Africa. This may have led to some increase of local cocaine consumption. ... 

Ministry of Interior / Turkish National Police, Turkish Report on Drugs and Organized Crime 2006, March 2007. 

Europol s EU Organized Crime Threat Assessment 2006 http //www.europol.europa.eu/publications/OCTA/OCTA2006.pdf Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada s 2006 Annual Report on Organized Crime in Canada ... 

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 55/25, United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. Annex I, Article 2, Subsection A, 8 January 2001. 

Europol, EU Organized Crime Threat Assessment 2006, op cit. Reuter, P., R. MacCoun, and P. Murphy. Money from crime A study of the economics of drug dealing in Washington D.C, Santa Monica Rand Corporation, 1990, p. 23. http //www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2005/R3894.pdf... 

Zorin, Y. Interview with Aleksandr Yelin, Deputy Chief of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Department for Combating Organized Crime and Terrorism. Izvestiya, 1 February 2007. 

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