Author: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Caribbean Regional Office
Title: The Value of Illegal Drug Exports Transiting the Caribbean - 1981-2000
Summary: What is the contribution of the trade in illegal drugs to the Caribbean economy? Given the inflation of data and figures presented in the mass media, it may seem that it is not difficult to estimate this contribution. A partial review of the mass media and scientific articles produces several dozen estimates for different concepts and countries. The variations between these estimates are so large that they cannot be explained solely in terms of the concepts employed or of methodological variations. In order to overcome the methodological weaknesses found in most estimates, this study will attempt to carry out a methodologically more refined experiment to calculate the value of the illicit drug exports from the Caribbean region. This quantification will be limited to the main export substances - cocaine and marijuana - ignoring the value of other illicit drugs that are reexported from the Caribbean, such as heroin or the various forms of amphetamine-type substances (ATS) for which the calculation is much more difficult and the significance in economic terms much lower for the time being. This academic experiment will use a demand-based methodology. In other words, starting with the value of demand in the countries that are importing drugs from the Caribbean, the model will try to infer the amount of drugs leaving the Caribbean. While the weakness of this focus and the limited reliability of the data on which the calculation is based cannot be ignored - and this shortcoming will be borne in mind throughout the paper - a demand-based methodology is preferred to other models based on capital or merchandise flows. Moreover, the annual corrections to these figures have tended to be quite significant. This trend in revising figures, apart from adding further doubts about the reliability of the data, prevents the use of historical data. Finally, the overstatement of these figures, perhaps with the intention of externalising the drug problem from the consumer to producing countries, has been conspicuous. Present estimates of illegal drug exports from the Caribbean will take into account only the amount of a drug that passes through a jurisdiction in the region and will ignore the quantities of drugs that merely transit the Caribbean Sea on the way from the producing to the consuming countries. The assumption in this choice is that drugs that go through the Caribbean Sea without stopping in a Caribbean jurisdiction have no substantive influence on the local economies. In addition, the analysis will be divided between substances, cocaine and marijuana, and exporting markets - the North American market, including both the United States and Canada, and the European market.
Details: Bridgetown, Barbados: UNODC, Caribbean Regional Office, 2004. 46p.
Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 4, 2011 at: www.kfda.go.kr
Year: 2004
Country: International
URL:
Shelf Number: 121230
Keywords:
Drug TraffickingIllegal Drugs (Caribbean) |
