With synthetic drugs like pink cocaine on the rise, Colombia should not mimic its fight against the drugs like marijuana or cocaine in the 1990s; anti-drug policies must turn their focus from users to dealers.
Tag: cocaine
Known in the past decade as a horse tranquilizer and surgical anesthetic, ketamine is now gaining popularity as a party drug and even a life-coping aid. But while it shows promise in treating depression, its misuse brings real risks and a growing blind spot.
Cheap cocaine is flooding the European drug market, escalating conflicts in open drug scenes, everywhere except the historically drug-tolerant Zurich. A visit to this Swiss city — known as an open-air hotspot for crack and heroin in the 1990s — with a different approach for taking on drug addiction.
Ecuador’s simmering civil war, curiously, appears to also be a byproduct of the disbanding of Colombia’s FARC rebels in 2016. Since then, chaos has reigned through much of Latin American drug trafficking routes, reverberating with criminal elements in Ecuador.
Italy’s highest-profile nemesis of organized crime networks, prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, discusses the mob’s use of social networks, and how TikTok allows criminal organizations to advertise their lifestyle to impressionable viewers. Sound familiar?
After the fall of the Sicilian Mafia boss of bosses Matteo Messina Denaro, it’s time for Cosa Nostra to rebuild, and they’ll be taking inspiration from their own past, but also must face the rising power of the ‘ndrangheta in the neighboring region of Calabria
Convincing coca farmers to plant legal crops is better than spraying poisonous pesticides to wipe out the plants. And yet it turns out these crop substitution programs are problematic, disrupting livelihoods and unintentionally causing violence and deforestation.
At least 20 people have died after taking toxic cocaine bought in a poor suburb of the Argentine capital. Police have doubts that it was just an accident, and may have been a diabolical attempt by a drug gang to discredit the product of its rivals.
Grandpa, pass the unmarked 20s….
Given the harm mobsters like Pablo Escobar inflicted on Colombia’s image and society, how have they kept such a prominent place in the national culture 25 years after his death?
Authorities seized 701 kilograms of cocaine on a ship in the port of Oran. The record haul points to a growing network linking South America to Europe via Algeria.
Expected to return to Cali after serving prison time, some old gangsters will find a ‘new generation’ of criminals running businesses in town. Will that mean trouble,
Repatriating people like Ismael Arciniegas, a Colombian executed in China for drug smuggling, could create a perverse incentive.
MANAUS — There’s a gang war raging across northern Brazil. It has led to prison riots in which close to 100 inmates have been killed since the beginning of the year. This violence is linked to the flow of cocaine from Peru to Brazil’s northern, northeastern and central-western regions. The money involved is huge — […]
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Extra! FARC Cocaine Labs Go Up In Smoke
El Tiempo, Aug. 3 “Police destroyed 104 FARC laboratories in Guaviare,” reads the Wednesday front page of the Colombian daily El Tiempo. An accompanying image shows security forces operating in the nation’s thick southeastern jungle. The head of the anti-narcotics police announced yesterday that the 104 cocaine laboratories, run by the FARC (or Revolutionary Armed […]
A recent drug raid in a south-central Bogotá neighborhood that shares its name with the New York borough uncovers a veritable den of vice, violence and unfettered gang rule.
VIZCATÁN DEL ENE — Deep in the Peruvian Andes, a valley dominated by the drug trade now finds itself at the heart of a resurgent Marxist insurgency. The valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers, known as the Vraem, was the scene of an April 11 attack by the Shining Path that left eight […]
La Prensa, Jan. 11, 2015 “Horrified!” Monday’s front page of Mexican daily La Prensa reads, quoting White House reaction to the Rolling Stone”s interview — by actor Sean Penn — with the world’s most prominent drug trafficker, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Mexican authorities started U.S. extradition proceedings late Sunday against the Mexican drug kingpin, who […]
Al-Akhbar, Oct. 27, 2015 “His Royal Drugs,” reads Tuesday’s front page of Lebanese Arabic-language daily Al-Akhbar, one day after a Saudi prince and four others were arrested at the Beirut airport after authorities found more than two tons of illegal drugs on a Saudi-bound private jet. Prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz was among […]
Like with the 18th century Andean silver route for Spain, Argentina has become a short cut for sending Peruvian and Bolivian cocaine to Europe. It’s also a customer.
Pope Francis has been surprisingly progressive on such issues as gay rights. But so far he’s taken the hard line on denouncing drugs. That could change if he sees that legalization is the best chance for reducing violence.
The news, quantified.
TEL AVIV — When Lucy Brown fell in love with her current husband a decade ago, she immediately went to work. When she arrived, she lay down in the latest fMRI brain scanner, closed her eyes and thought of him. “It’s not that I was looking for scientific proof that I was in love,” Brown […]
TIGRE — Is there a place they haven’t thought of yet to hide drugs? How about a meat pie? Argentine police have uncovered a so-called “narcopizzeria” in the district of Tigre in the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires, which supplied customers with cocaine hidden in “pizzas, pies and chicken.” A report in Clarín showed pictures […]
KEMPTEN — Perhaps it’s a rather tired comparison, but the Allgäu region in the southern German state of Swabia is well known for its snow. This past weekend it was piled several feet deep on the Nebelhorn mountain. Eight ski lifts were in operation, with winter vacationers on every run. A few miles to the […]
Though reports say Peru has surpassed Colombia as world’s top source of cocaine, it has not faced the same kind of violence. Is Lima turning a blind eye toward drug trafficking?
RIO DE JANEIRO – Cleide Oliveira, a 45-year-old beauty salon owner specialized in straightening curly hair, says she’ll soon be forced to find a new job. Since November 2011, when a Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora or Police Pacifying Unit (UPP) was created in Rocinha — Brazil’s biggest favela near Rio de Janeiro — she has […]
O GLOBO, FOLHA DE S. PAULO (Brazil) Worldcrunch CAMPINAS – A Brazilian transvestite has been arrested at Viracopos International Airport for allegedly trying to smuggle drugs he’d packed into an extra-large prosthetic posterior, reports Folha de S. Paulo. According to police in this southeastern Brazilian city, the suspect was due to embark on a Lisbon-bound […]
Two decades after the Sicilian Mafia killed magistrate hero Giovanni Falcone, crime networks have shifted drug trafficking from bases to Russia, Colombia, Burma…and beyond.
Behind codes of encryption, the so-called “Deep Web” hosts a vast network of people trading in illegal sales of all sorts, most notably any drug imaginable.
PICHARI – Miguel doesn’t make a sound on his way to the plantation. “Best to keep a low profile, put away your microphone,” he advises. The path leads all the way over the Apurímac River, whose brown waters wind through the middle of the forest, to a clearing where shrubs of coca grow across 12 […]
-Analysis- PARIS – In Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, the shepherd Santiago travels to the ends of the earth seeking a treasure that was close by all along. And sometimes, too, we find the key to understanding what is happening in our country today by reading about things far away. Two scholarly articles published last […]