In large commercial seaports policing and security efforts to counter drug trade, especially cocaine, do not appear to be effective beyond mere displacement. Nevertheless, a “utopia of security” is at the core of designs of today’s ports in the western world. This approach dismisses that most ports are also borderlands, contested spaces also for illicit trade.

Drawing from knowledge gathered through qualitative fieldwork in 8 seaports (2019-2022) and specifically focusing of the case study of the Port of Piraeus (2022), this paper will sustain a counter-intuitive argument.

We can hypothesise that cross border and local policing efforts can consider the borderland when countering cocaine trafficking through seaports. Only cocaine destined to the local/national market should be subjected to disruption activities at/around the port, while cross border cocaine trade can be handled with a different approach via international cooperation, by letting cocaine go and reach its destination (to be then ‘chased’ and disrupted elsewhere). Albeit controversial, this approach might lead to 1) reduction of harm connected to the narcotics at national level by better streamlining local resources and 2) a better understanding of how the port-borderland shapes the space and the communities where it exists, also for illicit purposes.

Theft of medicines and medical devices is a relevant component of the illicit trade in pharmaceutical products. Evidence demonstrates the increasing role of organised criminal groups or networks usually targeting highly priced medicines and products with the aim of either reintroducing illicitly stolen products into the legal supply chain or selling them on the black market. This trend is further amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic and by the consequences of the current Ukrainian war that generated new criminal opportunities. This crime has relevant impacts that go beyond the value of the stolen products, including harm to the health of citizens and damages to legitimate companies and national health systems. However, the currently available knowledge on the theft of medicines is scarce. This paper is based on the preliminary results of the EU-funded Project MEDI-THEFT to present and discuss the most common criminal schemes used by criminals to steal and fence medicines and medical devices. Potential remedies and policy implications are also discussed.

Leading researchers have identified three primary functions that criminal organizations help fulfill, namely 1) entrepreneurial, 2) associational, and 3) governmental. Studies of transnational drug trafficking have demonstrated that governmental functions in the drug trade mainly occur at the local level. In contrast, the global commerce of drugs mostly unfolds through entrepreneurial interactions within an international market largely devoid of governance structures. Recent evidence on the structure and activities of the organized crime group (OCG) known as the Sinaloa cartel suggests that in the last decades, the criminal organization attained a position that allowed it to exert limited forms of governance on the behavior of its associates in the cocaine trade across the Americas. Based on an analysis of the testimonies of witnesses in the trial of Joaquin Guzman Loera, former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, we examine the transnational governance functions of the OCG and the conditions allowing their emergence.

The aim of this presentation is an attempt to develop an alternative to the previous approaches to criminality, the concept of collective trajectory (CT). This novel concept explains the social context of recruitment into drug trafficking organizations (DTO) in Mexico through field observations (since 2015) and in-depth interviews with cartel members and associates (N=67) as well as academics, criminal justice representatives, and social workers (17). The presentation highlights the process of recruiting young people into Mexican drug cartels (DTOs) and in the riskiest positions (halcones, dealers, kidnappers, and hitmen). Unlike deductive corrections and statistically created and verified criminological theories, collective analysis of trajectories is derived from inductively research and qualitative data collected and analyzed in a culturally different Mexico. The aim is to show that CT is useful in explaining recruiting by drug cartels in underclass communities affected by the long-term presence of organized crime.

Many studies on organized crime are based on data collected in one specific country. Despite the fact that much drug related organized crime is transnational by nature, most scholars are unable to get access to data in various countries and focus on the situation in their own country. As a result, cross border aspects of drug trafficking are often neglected. This paper takes a multinational approach and is based on data collected in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands; it addresses the current situation in the Meuse Rhine EU-region, a geographically small area in Europe where German, Belgian and Dutch influences can be found. The main question that will be addressed is how criminal networks, the modi operandi and ‘business models’ of criminal entrepreneurs in the drug world have developed over the years in this EU-region, and how criminal networking and criminal activities have been influenced by the presence of various national borders.