The use of children in the production, sales and trafficking of drugs

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The use of children in the production, sales and trafficking of drugs

Tshibola L.A.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the involvement of children in the production, sale and trafficking of drugs. Youth or children is a rehabilitation center and deserves special attention when it comes to taking stock of the relationships between narcotics. This article aims to describe how the involvement of children in the production and trafficking of drugs is a national and international hazard. The writer makes a brief history of drugs and talks about the effects of drugs on children. In this article, the author proposes ways to combat the involvement of children in the production, sale and trafficking of drugs.

Keywords: children, production, sale, inventory, drugs, traffic, use.

Illicit activities include illegal activities and crimes. Drug production and trafficking are illegal activities in which children are often involved. To trade means to trade illegally (when buying or selling). Children may be involved against their will or in the belief that it will give them status and money. Children who produce or trade drugs are at significant risk of abuse and many become addicted to drugs at a very young age.

Street children, runaways or children living in poverty are also used in organized begging. Sometimes children are even intentionally disfigured to attract more money from passers-by and can be beaten if they cannot collect enough money.

Children involved in illicit activities are often exposed to violence, which can seriously affect their mental and physical development. In addition, they cannot develop good social relationships, are much more likely to suffer from depression, addiction to alcohol and drugs, experience identity difficulties and become young offenders.

Illicit international relations continue to flourish. Beyond traditional criminal activities (drugs, weapons, human trafficking and counterfeiting), fraudulent bankruptcies and political or entrepreneurial corruption demonstrate the extreme difficulty of fighting against activities that use the same mechanisms as those of globalization.

Illicit Activities In The World [3]

History of drugs

The face of a young victim must challenge the parents. The lack of family communication is denounced and we can only worry about this latent danger.

The term "drug" evolves singularly in space as well as in time. In a society, it displays values (savoir-vivre, conviviality, health), practices (normality, lawfulness), deviances and suspicions (social danger, risks). A look, like this child, on the last five western centuries.

Drug use became an important phenomenon in Europe in the 19th century, when opium (a liquid from the opium poppy plant) imported from India to England, and hashish imported into France from North African colonies, started to be widespread.[4]

At the time, narcotics were not considered as a prohibited thing in principle. In fact, the British East India Company sold Indian opium in China, and attempts by the Chinese authorities to put an end to this trade led to two Opium wars. The Opium Wars in China have been one of the darkest pages in history. Moreover, China's anti-drug legislation is currently very repressive.

In fact, at that time, the sale of narcotics was controlled by the government, and most representatives of the British aristocracy, including members of the royal family, gained fortunes by controlling this business.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, well-known drugs, such as cocaine (sold in the United States from 1885) and heroin (sold in Germany from 1898), have become widespread. Cocaine was used as a stimulant, a kind of energy product. [5] The heroine was qualified by the company Bayer AG, which launched it on the market, of sedative and analgesic.

In 1961, the International Convention on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations (UN) defines drugs as "a scourge for the individual that is also an economic and social danger for humanity"[1]. This does not mean that a war on drugs is declared: the text is only intended to unify and clarify all the regulatory mechanisms of the international trade in narcotics and to prohibit the non-medical uses of the substances listed.

The United Nations supervisory bodies did not conceive otherwise of the drug problem: the abnormal trajectory of controlled products beyond the legal circuit at an age when iatrogenic drug addiction dominates. Today, the problem has risen to the proportions of an opioid pandemic with a whole range of stupefying substances or not, to which many young people are engaged. For five years, the disease has won hundreds of thousands of children and young adolescents; it knows no geographical boundaries ".

The great fear of the 1960s

Hippies, protesting students, pop or psychedelic artists, etc. have all made drug use an important element that makes addiction not just a youth disease, but also a crisis of civilization. The public is both fascinated and worried by this new wave.

With the use of amphetamines and hallucinogens, there is a fight against the reason for the beginning, a refusal of everything that makes our society. The reporters report the big gatherings of the hippie era, which take place mainly in the United States: the big love-in of the Golden Gate Park of January 1967 in San Francisco, of the Grand Canyon in June 1967, the Sommer of love of the Haigh Ashbury's hippie district back to San Francisco which saw a festive gathering of thousands of young people. Then come the time of the great concerts like in Bethel in 1969, or the Isle of Wight in 1970. [9]

Heroin, morphine, cannabis, hallucinogens have established everywhere their reign. From there, the monster has sprung up in Britain and Sweden. For two years, France was also affected. Meanwhile, the problem has also become politicized in the United States. On March 2, 1966, President Johnson asked the FBI to carry out a redoubled control over the trafficking and use of narcotics, while the following month, Dr. James Goddard, responsible for the regulation of hazardous and medicinal substances, sent a warning letter to the administrators of 2,000 US colleges and universities to talk about the "great threat" facing young people.

The dead are quickly counted by hundreds: 170 deaths by overdose in New York for the year 1970 announce the press and television. At the beginning of the 1970s, New York embodies the new ravages of drug addiction: death, crime (small traffic or assault on the part of the cameos to get money), insecurity. In a report broadcast in 1972, the New York prosecutor said: "There are 300,000 drug addicts, five murders a day and 15 policemen were killed last year in the line of duty, do you think the violence has reached a point of no return here?” Especially in other countries, this phenomenon is present, as with the overdose of a young girl in Bandol (France) in 1969 was highly publicized and aroused a great parliamentary debate that led to the law of 1970 severely reinforcing the prohibitionist regime.

In conclusion, the 1970s marked the development of new drugs, related to the malaise of a certain youth and to musical movements that voluntarily or not the apology. It is the appearance of cannabis (it was called marijuana), especially with enthusiasm for Rasta movements, Jamaica and reggae music. More "hard" drugs also happen, often opiate derivatives (heroin) or cocaine. It is also the development of LSD, powerful synthetic drug with hallucinatory virtues, very "hippy".

Nixon, Reagan and the war on drugs

In 1968 Republican nominee to the White House, Richard Nixon, made drugs an important theme of his campaign for the return of law and order against lax Democrats. In 1970, a new federal law, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act unifies and strengthens the provisions relating to the control and prohibition of psychotropic substances but also provides for a health component by encouraging the development of heroin addiction treatment centers. In June 1971, in a famous speech, the president described drug addiction as the "number one public enemy" in the United States.

In 1973, the former BNDD (Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) gave way to a new DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) with tenfold means. [9] But was it a healthy crusade without any political overtones? Some researchers have speculated that the new legislative arsenal would have been used as a pretext to neutralize student and protest youth who, through their gatherings and sit-ins, were waging a peaceful but subversive fight against military involvement in Vietnam: failing that. to attack them head on, at the risk of calling into question the principles of the Freedom of Speech, the suspicion (proven or not) of drug consumption could have constituted a good political weapon to try to gag a revolted youth.

Beyond the French question, the "war on drugs" appears in fact as a more general window of opportunity for American foreign policy, the sources of the drug being multiple, and the pressure on France was only one action among others. As shown by the pressure on the Turkish government for the limitation of poppy plantations and the adoption of alternative crops, also one of the major issues of the 1971 Azores Summit, or the "Operation Intercept" in 1969 aimed at to systematically search any vehicle entering the United States through the border with Mexico (in order to bring the Mexican government, also offended by this unilateral initiative, to monitor drug trafficking on its territory), it was a question of breaking the traditional narcotics trade routes to protect the US territory.

Drugs in Latin America

Latin America is the birthplace of many drugs and the location of the world's largest cartels (criminal organization). The drug cartels are located in the poorest slums, which are very poor places, it is the people who build their own houses. Living conditions are very difficult, children are often out of school and have no father. These children fall into prostitution and crime, they are used in drug cartels.

Latin America is the largest cocaine supplier in the world. 3 countries: Bolivia, Colombia and Peru hold the monopoly of coca leaf but the traffic extends to Mexico, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Colombia is one of the countries in which the drug economy is present. There is a confrontation between drug traffickers who are drug traffickers selling narcotics around the world and the government. Colombian elites have long wanted to see drug trafficking as an "informal economy" or a "smuggling economy," in other words, drugs are part of the usual landscape.

For years, Colombia's drug economy has developed without causing concern. It was evoked as a new "informal" economy, an illegal but tolerated economy.

In the 1970s, Colombians intervene in transfer operations to the US, they have considerable income on their informal economy.

The production and trafficking of drugs raises important problems in various sectors of public action: agricultural, health, education, urban violence but also at the international level, the image of the country that has an impact on tourism.

Anti-drug policies in Latin America are highly vulnerable to exogenous pressures (coming from outside) as there is significant and significant foreign financial support. Then, the drug was defined as a problem by the industrialized countries, so the consumers and not the producers. Since the 1960s, when the traffic really took off and there was an economic boom, this trade has had its ups and downs.

Cocaine has long been a luxury product for the upper classes. In the years 1976-1979, there was an expansion of the US cocaine market. Uncontrolled plantations of drug crops have spread in the Andes, which has made possible the growth of the drug market. Therefore, in the cultivation of coca (raw materials for cocaine) and hemp (raw material for marijuana), there have been significant changes in favor of the production of synthetic drugs produced in illegal pharmacological laboratories. [8]

Diagram on Drug Trafficking in Latin America [1]

Drugs in Europe

Drug use developed rapidly in Germany and Europe in the mid-1960s with the emergence of a politicized youth culture, new lifestyles, and a growing number of student protests. This was a period of challenge to the established order in which the hippie subculture gained popularity, as explained above, and the use of various drugs, cannabis and LSD in particular, was considerably reduced. Widespread as a means of attaining altered states of consciousness. [10]

Although most young people are not part of this hippy movement, for many of them he has set the tone for a different style of life. However, events such as the Vietnam War and the emergence of new youth subcultures have undoubtedly played an important role in this change.

This new subculture of youth, which combined political and cultural elements around the world, received wide media attention while also affecting the adult population. A debate was then launched, including on the values of children's education, on the principle of non-authority in education and on authority in general. Traditional morality had to be based on logical foundations and questioned.

From the beginning of this "cultural revolution", the use of drugs, essentially cannabis, became a mass phenomenon that was inseparable and greatly stimulated. This cultural insertion and this link with the "revolt" of young people allowed them to act to counter the largely negative opinion of the population towards cannabis.

Diagram of drug trafficking in Europe [2]

II. Flight against the involvement of children in the production and trafficking of drugs

drug sale child trafficking

Narcotics are classified as illicit drugs because their trade or use is prohibited except for medical and scientific purposes.

Their traffic is defined by all the acts that may relate to it: production, manufacture, export, import, transport, possession, supply (i.e. the fact to propose), the assignment (the giving or selling), the acquisition and the use (the fact of using it other than by making use of it for himself) of narcotic drugs [11]. In the face of this global scourge, the international community has recognized that this problem can only be effectively solved if it is addressed collectively. It is in this sense that the United Nations drug control treaties have enunciated a set of binding rules of law and require States to adopt legal, administrative and political measures to fulfill their treaty obligations. [14]. at the level of the African continent, particularly the countries of the Maghreb and the Sahel, it has gradually become a new crossing point for various trafficking and in particular that of South American cocaine [13]. If this situation seems to be minimizing and to take a back seat in the fight against insecurity and instability by States inclined to fight terrorism, it should be noted that today, drug trafficking is combined with that weapons. This can only be of direct interest to the terrorists proven in the Sahel, that this illegal trade constituted a new source of financing.

Why do young people engage in drug trafficking networks? Why are they staying there? Why do most of them manage to withdraw in time before any arrest and incarceration? The answers to these three questions are crucial in that they shape how professionals can meet the challenges they face.

These young people are the "little hands" of the traffic. Most of them are boys involved in resale but young girls are not absent from these networks. Some integrate them by taking charge of the transport, playing the role of the "mule". The latter are often isolated and sometimes homeless, wandering, driven by necessity. Others integrate them through storage. Their apartment serves as a "nanny", is made available to dealers to store and work drugs.

The strictly economic dimension of such a commitment cannot be denied but the money is not easy because their activity is not very remunerative, while involving in addition many risks. They can then favor one product over another because of its price on the market price. Some have been able to sell shit, soap, pollen, coke and crack in turn. [7]. But they can also diversify the range of their products, proposing shit as well as cakes or seals, even if to be very reactive by varying the prices of a product during a same day.

The sense of youth involvement in these networks is not exhausted, however, in the economic dimension alone. Our approach, like other research carried out in other countries (Andrade Barros and Cypreste Faria, 2010) has made it possible to highlight its plural character. They are also driven by the need to belong and the desire to be more visible (Aubert and Haroche, 2011) to be recognized (Honneth, 2000). They find a social place valued and a way to gain the upper hand over others by ostentatiously showing their consumerist practices, their power to "pay the mark." Their entry into these networks allows them to confront the institute, a world of rules, norms and values and to try to be, in turn, establishing (Hess, Autier, 1993). [7]. It allows them to distance the real world and to be able to "tell stories", perhaps to fill the void of their existence and to fool boredom. It allows them to be "cool" (Barth and Muller, 2008), to be without being really there. It allows them to take a social revenge vis-а-vis the "system". Finally, there would be a way to reintegrate the "system" that violently repressed them, by taking another ways.

They finally find pleasure. First of all because they are proud to be recognized by their peers and their clients, to be able to give money to their parents, not to "swing", to rise in rank in the hierarchy, to have a famous name in the city. The pride found when the school was for them rather synonymous with shame and humiliation is not the least of the results obtained through this activity.

Prevent drug use among children

At age 17, more than 90% of youths have experienced alcoholic beverages and 59% report having been drunk in their lifetime. In addition, cannabis is the first illicit psychoactive product consumed in adolescence: four out of ten young people say they have already used it at the age of 17. These figures are all the more disturbing as the trend is towards the consumption of several substances at the same time.

No teen is immune to drugs and all socio-economic environments are affected. However, boys are slightly more at risk than girls: 74% of girls and 81% of 17 year old boys report drinking in the past month. For cannabis, it's 20% girls and 30% boys.

Contemporary legislation [6]

- 1961: States will react: psychoactive substances become a concern again. Ratification in New York of a list of banned and / or strictly regulated narcotics products. Among the products concerned: coca, cannabis, opium and their derivatives such as morphine, heroin and cocaine.

- 1971: Establishment of a complementary list to add synthetic substances such as amphetamines

1987: Risk reduction policy to fight against HIV including the sale of syringes in pharmacies and used syringe exchange program for non-used).

- 1988: A new international convention is held to establish a list of precursor molecules and therefore to add these molecules to the list of prohibited and / or regulated molecules. There is a strengthening of international cooperation to combat organized crime and trafficking. These texts will be incorporated into French legislation, which will adapt its legislation accordingly. From other countries, did the same thing.

- 1995: Risk reduction policy with access to substitution drugs such as methadone. This has resulted in a reduction of overdoses in France for nearly 20 years and a decrease in heroin demand.

- Today: International agencies of the state. They have to adapt to an offer in constant evolution: updating the lists of regulated psychoactive products and / or not allowed. It includes new synthetic drugs.

Finally, it is essential to note that each country tries to regulate better between bans, prevention and care.... This is to reduce the problems health and social services related to drugs and their consumption. services related to drugs and their consumption.

Conclusion

In order to combat the involvement of children in the production and trafficking of drugs, it is important for the establishment of drug abuse prevention programs to follow some general principles. These are in no way intended to limit the range of choices available to us but are in a way a reflection of the experience gained by those who have been working in this field for a long time.

a) Young people are not all the same and not all equally vulnerable. Strategies should therefore be carefully individualized to focus on clearly defined target groups;

b) Combining different strategies together is probably the best way to tackle the problem of drug abuse. Ideally, these strategies should combine the knowledge / attitudes / behaviors approach with health promotion and self-esteem development and resistance;

c) Your strategies should try to encourage individuals to be strong and promote the factors that protect the individual in difficult environments and situations and should try to equip young people with a variety of specific attitudes to help them resist young people of their age who push them to use drugs, for example as regards communication and interaction with their environment. It is also important to provide young people with affordable opportunities to get together, to encourage them to take an interest in the arts, to play sports and to participate in other activities that build their self-confidence;

d) You will need to involve youth from the target community at all stages of developing your prevention programs;

e) Prevention should not concern a single drug but should aim, in accordance with the broader concept of health promotion, not only for the abuse of drugs, but also for other substances such as tobacco, alcohol and inhalants ;

f) Young people are usually receptive to new information if it is factual and does not contradict in all respects their own experience of the drug. Inspiring fear dispels the lack of confidence that young people may have in adult counseling and, in some cases, even encourages risky behavior;

g) Prevention programs should involve the family and the community as a whole to strengthen the information that is communicated to youth in the context of prevention activities.

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