The Tajik-Afghan border
A friend of the blog recently requested some sources on drug trafficking in Central Asia so here’s what I’ve got. Feel free to tack on any additional info in the comment section.
1. Regional Background:
Rediscovering Central Asia, S. Frederick Starr. Essential cultural and historical background.
This vast region of irrigated deserts, mountains, and steppes between China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the Caspian Sea is easily dismissed as a peripheral zone, the “backyard” of one or another great power. [...] By and large, most people abroad ignore the land of Ibn Sina and al-Biruni, dismissing it as an inconvenient territory to be crossed while getting somewhere else.
Central Asia Human Development Report (2005), UNDP. At 268 pages, this monster will tell you most everything you need to know about economic and social conditions in Central Asia:
Few parts of the world are as interdependent as the five Central Asian landlocked countries. The five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—are more distant from the nearest seaports than any other countries in the world. Especially for the smaller states, land transit routes represent irreplaceable economic lifelines. The Central Asian republics are also bound together by their water and energy endowments, with upstream countries holding some of the world’s largest freshwater reserves, and downstream countries containing important fossil fuel resources. While the latter depend upon their upstream neighbours for irrigating water-intensive cotton production, the upstream countries depend equally on their downstream neighbours for their energy needs.
Drug Trafficking on the Great Silk Road: The Security Environment in Central Asia (1999), Martha Brill Olcott and Natalia Udalova. An interesting pre-9/11 report (AKA back when we thought all drugs came from South and Central America) on how drug trafficking developed in the region.
The drug problem is still a relatively new one for the Central Asian region. Until the last years of communist rule, drug use in the Soviet Union was nowhere near as wide-spread as it was in the West. In fact, official propaganda portrayed addiction to drugs as a “capitalist disease” that could not spread to the socialist world. All data concerning drug trade and the number of drug addicts was classified and considered to be a state secret, making it almost impossible to estimate the number of drug addicts in the USSR. The beginning of the war in Afghanistan, however, changed the status quo, since many of the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan got addicted to opiates. They also established business relations with the Afghan drug producers, some of whom continue to serve as a source of the present expanded drug trade.
Read more after the jump ---->
1. Regional Background:
Rediscovering Central Asia, S. Frederick Starr. Essential cultural and historical background.
This vast region of irrigated deserts, mountains, and steppes between China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, and the Caspian Sea is easily dismissed as a peripheral zone, the “backyard” of one or another great power. [...] By and large, most people abroad ignore the land of Ibn Sina and al-Biruni, dismissing it as an inconvenient territory to be crossed while getting somewhere else.
Central Asia Human Development Report (2005), UNDP. At 268 pages, this monster will tell you most everything you need to know about economic and social conditions in Central Asia:
Few parts of the world are as interdependent as the five Central Asian landlocked countries. The five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—are more distant from the nearest seaports than any other countries in the world. Especially for the smaller states, land transit routes represent irreplaceable economic lifelines. The Central Asian republics are also bound together by their water and energy endowments, with upstream countries holding some of the world’s largest freshwater reserves, and downstream countries containing important fossil fuel resources. While the latter depend upon their upstream neighbours for irrigating water-intensive cotton production, the upstream countries depend equally on their downstream neighbours for their energy needs.
Drug Trafficking on the Great Silk Road: The Security Environment in Central Asia (1999), Martha Brill Olcott and Natalia Udalova. An interesting pre-9/11 report (AKA back when we thought all drugs came from South and Central America) on how drug trafficking developed in the region.
The drug problem is still a relatively new one for the Central Asian region. Until the last years of communist rule, drug use in the Soviet Union was nowhere near as wide-spread as it was in the West. In fact, official propaganda portrayed addiction to drugs as a “capitalist disease” that could not spread to the socialist world. All data concerning drug trade and the number of drug addicts was classified and considered to be a state secret, making it almost impossible to estimate the number of drug addicts in the USSR. The beginning of the war in Afghanistan, however, changed the status quo, since many of the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan got addicted to opiates. They also established business relations with the Afghan drug producers, some of whom continue to serve as a source of the present expanded drug trade.
Read more after the jump ---->
2 Comments
Loading
