Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
from their rivals), thus effecting a kind of selection: those who are better organised stay
immune to control. The laws prohibiting the use, buying, possession and production of drugs
contribute to the same result.
Presently, there are no less than 500,000 drug users in St.Petersburg, and their number is
increasing. This is corroborated by research carried out in the Center of Deviantology and
elsewhere. The drugs market is changing because of the influence of many factors: the
political and economical situation in the countrym, legislation, production opportunities,
police action, and fashion.
Leningrad (St.Petersburg) has always been one of the centers of synthetic drug production.
According to this indicator, it is presently the leading center in the country.
Barbiturates, amphetamines, PCP, LSD, MDMA, DOP and their modifications differ very
much from each other according to how complicated and expensive they are to produce. At
the moment, all necessary opportunities for producing synthetic drugs are available: there is
practically no control over the necessary chemical components, most of the highly qualified
chemists are unemployed, and nearly all existing chemical laboratories are not in operation
and are bankrupt. There is no doubt that widespread narcotics production has already begun,
intended also for Western European markets.
The phenomenon of a “new youth culture” has become popular among young people, linked
to a youth subculture around discotheques. This can explain the increasing number of
narcotics users with a rather high social status, and with a financial position much higher than
average. Drugs being fashionable is a very important feature of the present situation. It is not
only that certain kind of drugs are fashionable, but drug use as such has become a matter of
prestige.
Despite the fashionability of synthetic drugs, opiates and cannabis are the principal drugs in
St.Petersburg. This market is very stable, because of the very well functioning channels of
distribution.
Representatives of organised crime penetrate the legal economy because they must invest
large sums of money obtained by illegal narcotics sales into legal business. All over the
world, this is the way legal and illegal businesses cooperate and become integrated.
Of course, Russia is no exception. The result of such integration is the consolidation of legal
and illegal business in a kind of economic symbiosis. First: large sums of money accumulated
in the narcotics business allow organised crime to penetrate high levels of the economic,
political and information sectors, and to invest money into the financial sector. This naturally
leads to the consequence that whole branches of the legal economy are in the hands of
organised crime. Second: the influence of organised crime turns legal sources of money into a
kind of “holes” for money transition into criminal spheres and for criminal purposes.
The narcotics business makes use of different mechanisms such as fixing prices, expanding
the market e.g. by multi-level marketing (the main advantage of which is that it induces
clients to find new clients), by promoting a broad selection of drugs and inventing new
preparates. Narcotics money is invested in all branches of the legal economy. These are in
great need of capital, and for example state securities produced by most governments are very
convenient to turn such money into legal capital.
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