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characterizes traffickers as adaptive individuals who pay close attention to
countermeasures taken by governments to interdict and deter drug shipments. This is
even truer after September 11, when the pressures through border security have
considerably increased especially in the US. Nonetheless supplies are at an all time high!
Second, disputes between two parties in the chain cannot be resolved either by
hierarchy or by the legal system of a state. This increases “transaction costs”
considerably. Therefore, it is not surprising that while there is some cooperation between
different groups, the majority of trafficking between the producer, transit and consumer
countries is done within ethnically homogenous groups where kinship ties still play an
important role. “In America, as in Europe, immigrants are the major importers and
distributors of heroin. This is simply because the smuggling networks prefer to deal with
their own and don’t trust outsiders. Nigerians will sell to fellow West Africans, Chinese
to immigrants from back home and so on.” (Brzezinski 2002:46).
The major trends in the late 1990s, however, included further decentralization of
larger networks of drug smuggling organizations into smaller units and the increasing
presence of “short networks”, small self contained groups linked only by function and
need. Not only were the organizations getting smaller and more insular, but they were
linked only by function, information and immediate need with little permanent structure
and durability of functional integration (Layne et al. 2001: Appendix C).
With its enormous profit margins and small size, heroin is ideally suited to be
shipped tens of thousands of miles and smuggled across multiple borders. Far smaller
networks are required to smuggle heroin than cocaine and marijuana, because the profit
margins per kilo are much higher in the first case, i.e. smugglers need to transport only a
Convention