GLOBALIZATION & TRANSNATIONAL CRIMES
THE UNIVERSITY OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
RESEARCH AND DATA ANALYSIS
TRANSNATIONAL CRIMES CRITICALLY DISCUSS HOW THE PROCESS OF GLOBALIZATION HAS INFLUENCED THE GROWTH OF TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME.
Globalization is the process of interaction and integration of people, ideals and governments worldwide which is driven by trade, investment and the quest for market expansion and propelled by constant technological advancements particularly in telecommunications infrastructure and the growth of the internet. It is a contemporary phenomenon that is reflected in art, popular music, linguistic changes and migration; we?ve all become one big global economy. The world today experiences wide spread economic
…show more content…
And the attendant gun trade. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and concurring governments have conducted studies and surveys of the major cultivation areas for coca bush and opium poppy for many years, and so estimates can be made with some precision as to how much cocaine and heroin are being produced. Drug trafficking and drug addiction create a temporal link between the fates of communities in the developed and developing worlds, even if the numbers of persons involved are quite small. According to the UN Office of Drug Control (UNODC), over a twelve-month period spanning 2005 and 2006, an estimated two hundred million persons used drugs illegally out of a global population of 6.475 billion. Of these, 110 million used drugs on a monthly basis, of which twenty-five million, or 0.6 percent of the global working age population (15?64), were classed as ??problem drug users.?? (Siracusa, 2009). Many countries submit their drug seizure data to UNODC, and most of the main terminus countries have survey data on the size of the drug-using population. Supply, demand and seizures can be triangulated to give a more dependable picture than any single data source could generate. As a result, some trends can be tracked with considerable confidence. It is clear, for example, that long-term declining demand for cocaine in the United States and rapidly growing demand for it in Europe have reconfigured international drug markets. Between 2004 and 2008, West Africa suddenly became an important transit area for the drug in a way never seen before. Also unusual is the growing trafficking of cocaine base products from Bolivia to neighbouring developing countries in the Southern Cone. The Caribbean countries also acts as another main transit point in the demand and supply chain. These phenomena can be tracked through supply, demand and seizure statistics. But there remain many gaps