Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling

Lessons from the Inside

Scott H. Decker, Margaret Townsend Chapman

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781592136438, 9781592136421
• eBook ISBN: 9781592136445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drug Smugglers on Drug Smuggling features interviews with 34 convicted drug smugglers -- most of them once major operators -- detailing exactly how drugs are smuggled into the U.S. from Latin America.  These sources provide tangible evidence of the risks, rewards, and organization of international drug smuggling.

Quoting frequently from their interviews, Decker and Chapman explain how individuals are recruited into smuggling, why they stay in it, and how their roles change over time.  They describe the specific strategies their interviewees employed to bring drugs into the country and how they previously escaped apprehension.  Over-all, the authors find that drug smuggling is organized in a series of networks which are usually unconnected.

This extraordinarily informative book will be of particular interest to law enforcement officials and policymakers, but it will appeal to anyone who wants to know how the drug business actually works.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Motivation for the Study
• 2 Organization of the Study
• 3 Drug Smuggling Organizations
• 4 Movement of Drugs
• 5 Roles, Recruitment into, and Remaining Involved in the Drug Smuggling Trade
• 6 Balancing Risk and Reward
• 7 Making Sense of Drug Smuggling: Conclusions and Summary
• Appendix 1. Instrumentation Study Design
• Appendix 2. Study Design
• Notes
• References
• Index