Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey explores the history of organized crime in Turkey and the roles which gangs and gangsters have played in the making of the Turkish state and Turkish politics. Turkey's underworld, which has been at the heart of several devastating scandals over the last several decades, is strongly tied to the country's long history of opium production and heroin trafficking. As an industry at the centre of the Ottoman Empire's long transition into the modern Turkish Republic, as important as the silk road had been in earlier centuries, the modern rise of the opium and heroin trade helped to solidify and complicate long-standing relationships between state officials and criminal syndicates. Such relationships produced not only ongoing patterns of corruption, but helped fuel and enable repeated acts of state violence. Drawing upon new archival sources from the United States and Turkey, including declassified documents from the Prime Minister's Archives of the Republic of Turkey and the Central Intelligence Agency, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey provides a critical window into how a handful of criminal syndicates played supporting roles in the making of national security politics in the contemporary Turkey. The rise of the 'Turkish mafia', from its origins in the late Ottoman period to its role in the 'deep state' revealed by the so-called Susurluk and Ergenekon scandals, is a story that mirrors troubling elements in the republic's establishment and emphasizes the transnational and comparative significance of narcotics and gangs in the country's past.

Attempts to systematically compare organised crime concepts, as well as historical and contemporary patterns and control policies in thirteen European countries. Based on a standardised research protocol, thirty-three experts from different legal and social disciplines provide insight through detailed country reports.

A study of the international drug trade traces the route taken by illicit drugs from the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia to the United States, discussing growers, processors, distributors, importers, and pushers.

From the time that President Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs in 1982 through today, the United States increased the military's role in interdiction and made illegal drugs a central component of U.S. foreign policy. Despite these actions, international drug trafficking has become the world's largest criminal enterprise and the United States is far and away the number one market for illegal drugs. This book sees the so-called war on drugs as a failure that has actually contributed to a growth in the drug trade. An overview of the U.S. antidrug policy is first provided, followed by an in-depth examination of the major criminal organizations that have been involved in trafficking, focusing on how these so-called hard targets got started, their organizational structure, their operations and how law enforcement worldwide has responded to their growth. The social, political and economic effects of drug trafficking are then explored. A concluding section assesses the impact of U.S. policy on the worldwide drug trade and puts forth what has been learned from this failed agenda.

Contains the proceedings of the 1st- Institute for Annual Review of United Nations Affairs, New York University, 1949-