Drug Violence Research Articles

Migration and Deportation - Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the US-Mexico Border. By Jeremy Slack. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 256. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. References. Index. $85.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Migration and Deportation - Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the US-Mexico Border. By Jeremy Slack. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 256. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. References. Index. 29.95 paper. - Volume 78 Issue 1

Greek Myth or Fact? The Role of Greek Houses in Alcohol and Drug Violations on American Campuses

Greek-letter student social groups, better known as fraternities and sororities, are a ubiquitous feature on many American higher education campuses. These organizations, especially fraternities, have a reputation for encouraging unruly and improper behavior among both members and non-members. This paper investigates the effect of the degree of prevalence of these Greek organizations at a campus, as measured by the percentage of students who are members of fraternities and sororities, on the instances of liquor and drug law violations on campuses, as measured by the number of arrests for liquor and drug laws violations. Using a unique dataset, which combines data from three sources, we find that a larger percentage of students in fraternities (but not sororities) is associated with an increase in the number of arrests for drug law violations. A larger percentage of students in sororities (but not the percentage of students in fraternities) is associated with a larger number of arrests for liquor law violations. This result is highly significant and is robust across various specifications.

Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the US‐Mexico Border. JeremySlack. University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp.

Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the US‐Mexico Border. JeremySlack. University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp.

“Spiritual Warfare” or “Crimes against Humanity”? Evangelized Drug Traffickers and Violence against Afro-Brazilian Religions in Rio de Janeiro

Since at least 2005, drug traffickers in the cities and favelas of the state of Rio de Janeiro have been carrying out systematic and violent assaults on Afro-Brazilian religious communities. Motivated by their conversion to sects of Evangelical Christianity that regard Afro-Brazilian religions as devil worship, the traffickers have forcibly expelled devotees of these faiths from their homes and temples, destroyed shrines and places of worship, and threatened to kill priests if they continue to practice their religion. Scholars have often described this religious landscape as a “conflict” and a “spiritual war.” However, I argue that Evangelized drug traffickers and Afro-Brazilian religions are not engaged in a two-sided struggle; rather, the former is unilaterally committing gross violations of the latter’s human rights, which contravene international norms prohibiting crimes against humanity and genocide.

Pilot Randomized Control Trial: Efficacy of a Group-Based Psychosocial Program for Youth with PTSD in the Brazilian Favelas.

The study aimed to evaluate Teaching Recovery Techniques (TRT) delivered to Brazilian youth who experienced drug violence in one Favela. Thirty children, 8 to 14years, were randomly assigned to TRT (n = 14) or to a treatment as usual group (n = 16) involving boxing/martial arts. Youth received five 90-min sessions over successive weeks. Standardized measures assessed Posttraumatic Stress and Depression at 2weeks pre and post-test. An exploratory assessment of posttraumatic growth was also utilized. An interview with group leaders explored perceptions of delivering TRT within the favela. Medium effect sizes were found for PTSD and Depression, and a small effect size for posttraumatic growth. Group leaders emphasized understanding the favela context for program adaptation. In conclusion, TRT was found to be effective for children with PTSD and Depression who experienced drug violence in a Brazilian favela. TRT is recommended for future delivery. Larger scale RCTs are needed in Brazilian favelas.

Over-the-Counter Drugs: Regulatory Analysis of Warning Letters Between Fiscal Years 2015-2019.

According to 21 Code of Federal Regulation (CFR) Part 211, Over-the-Counter (OTC) drug manufacturers must establish and follow current good manufacturing practices (cGMP) to produce quality products while meeting regulatory standards. The warning letters issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reveal quality inadequacies that may impact the safety and effectiveness of these products. This study provides an analysis of warning letters and cited violations to identify the most common areas of quality issues and to understand the FDA's current thinking on regulatory expectations. Warning letters between U.S. fiscal years (FY) 2015-2019 were analyzed by the following steps: extraction of CFR violations, categorization of violations, trend analysis of data, and interpretation of results. A total of 116 OTC warning letters and for comparison purposes 561 prescription (Rx) warning letters were analyzed in this study. OTC drug violations relating to product and process controls significantly increased, while violations relating to labeling decreased over the years. Despite these changes in violation numbers, the number of violations increased in most categories, highlighting a continual increase of quality inadequacies. The quality issues are mostly seen in cGMP violations specifically in the drug product, process, and laboratory controls. Most significant violation changes are also seen in drug product and process controls. The overall number of violations in OTC drugs has been increasing in the past 5 years and the analysis results provide a projection for continued increases in violations. Although this study provides an overall quality analysis of OTC warning letters and cited violations, more studies are required to understand the risk to consumers using OTC drug products due to the trends associated with these observations.

Adriana Estrada Álvarez, Nicolás Défossé and Diego Zavala Scherer (eds), Cine Político en México (1968–2017)

This is the second book in the Transamerican Film and Literature series published by Peter Lang. The first, Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature, reveals the series’ primary focus on Mexican culture,1 while Cine Político en México (1968–2017) is an insight into the breadth of research that is being undertaken in Mexico on film. Its publication by a European-based editorial provides a welcome opportunity to access such scholarship on this side of the Atlantic. ‘Politics’ is included in the title of the book because it is relevant to all the films under consideration. Another primary focus for most of the essays is violence, whether in the still open case of the students killed by government forces in the days leading up the Olympic Games in 1968, examined by Adriana Estrada Álvarez, or the structural violence of migration and displacement explored by Nicolás Défossé. The dates in the title are significant in this regard: 1968 was a moment of social rupture around the world, marked in Mexico by student and worker protests. After a summer of activism by students in Mexico City, the government killed an unspecified number in the run-up to the Olympic Games, hosted by the city in October that year. Using borrowed cameras from the film school, the protests were well documented by students and bystanders. In their introduction the editors posit this as a moment that established the urgency and responsibility of cinema to document and represent events, whilst acknowledging film’s limitations as a vehicle for truth-telling. They share with others the understanding that 1968 is pivotal; where they differ is in their level of optimism over its long-term effect. While others may suggest that 1968, despite culminating in violence, inspired social and political change, the editors question the consensus that this was a foundational moment of rebellion, and argue instead that it could be read as a moment when dissent was silenced. Their pessimism may well be influenced by the absence of justice for those who were killed in 1968 and the long history of subsequent violence and injustice in Mexico, right up the state’s complicity with the drug violence in recent decades.

Deported to death: How drug violence is changing migration on the US–Mexico border

Deported to death: How drug violence is changing migration on the US–Mexico border

Estética y contexto de los audiovisuales sobre narcotráfico en Latinoamérica en la era Netflix

In this text we will discuss the construction of a new aesthetic discourse on drug violence through audiovisuals in Latin America. Such a discourse is elaborated among different arts: literature or popular music ( narcocorridos ). In this article we will focus on the interpretation of historical events in the audiovisual products such as documentary, fiction and series. Specifically, we will analyze the fiction film Loving Pablo by Leon de Aranoa (2017), the documentary Ni vivos ni muertos by Mastrogiovanni (2014) and the series Narcos produced by Netflix (Padilha, 2015).

Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US–Mexico Border

Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US–Mexico Border

The torso is missing: Coming of age in 21st century Ireland

The social and cultural landscape of Ireland today is without any doubt quite different from its pre-Tiger days. On the one hand, constitutional amendments permitting divorce (1996), same-sex marriage (2015), and abortion (2018) have created grounds for the perception that Ireland is progressive (Cashin, 2017), liberal (Bielenberg, 2018), or at least catching up with the rest of advanced Western societal models. On the other hand, the lingering effects of post-Tiger austerity, an unprecedented housing crisis, the rise of violent drug and gang crimes, new family structures, and inadequate provisions for young people suffering with poor mental health, together and interdependently, mobilise an array of new social, cultural, and psychical symptoms. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s theorising in his early teachings of the family complexes and their effects upon the formation of subjectivity, social bond, and symptom, I will venture an interpretation of the psychical, social, and cultural effects with which Irish young people are living. Via the speaking bodies of Ireland’s Generation Z, I will make a bridge from Lacan’s early works to his later conceptual and clinical insights about the child’s symptom as a response to what does not work at the level of the parental couple relationship, and to considerations of the child’s symptom as a special effect of the mother’s fantasy, itself contoured by the new Irish symbolic order.

Psychopathy Mediates the Link Between Drug Abuse and Violence for NGRI Acquittees

Psychopathy Mediates the Link Between Drug Abuse and Violence for NGRI Acquittees

Disturbing Innocence: Defamiliarizing Narco Violence through Child Protagonists in Fiesta en la madriguera and Prayers for the Stolen

This article uses a Benjaminian framework to show how the two novels studied, Fiesta en la madriguera, by Juan Pablo Villalobos, and Prayers for the Stolen, by Jennifer Clement, leverage children’s unorthodox ways of perceiving the world in order to upend habitual ways of thinking about drugs and drug violence. Tochtli, a capo’s son, and Ladydi, a poor girl from Guerrero, create disorienting visions that constitute one mode of intoxication that exposes another: the exaltation of the sovereign and autonomous self that accompanies apparently disparate activities like shopping, cocaine abuse, and drug trafficking.

Review of David Birks and Thomas Douglas, eds., Treatment for Crime: Philosophical Essays on Neurointerventions in Criminal Justice

Neurological interventions are sometimes used to prevent criminal behavior. For instance, in some jurisdictions, sex offenders can be compelled to undergo treatment designed to reduce sexual desire. As David Birks and Thomas Douglas observe in their introduction to this volume, “chemical castration” may be just the tip of the iceberg. As neuroscience advances, it could reveal many other ways to control criminality. For instance, pharmacological treatments may help combat violent behavior or drug abuse. Such “crime-preventing neurointerventions” (CPNs) have been controversial. On the one hand, proponents argue that CPNs could be both more effective and more humane than incarceration. On the other, critics argue that coercively imposed CPNs violate individual rights and that society has a poor track record of using medical interventions for social control. The nineteen original essays in this book comprehensively cover and effectively advance the moral debate over the appropriate use of CPNs.

Should All Violent Offenders Be Treated Equally? Perceptions of Punishment and Rehabilitation for Violent Offenders with Varying Attributes

ABSTRACTResearch finds that, while people are pragmatic in response to crime control, individuals are more punitive toward violent than nonviolent offenders. This endeavor examines individuals’ simultaneous support for punishment and rehabilitation – balanced justice – for violent offenders with varying attributes. Using a convenience sample of 575 criminology and criminal justice students, this study examines if treatment beliefs and respondent demographic characteristics relate to sanctioning preferences. Findings indicate a balanced justice sanctioning preference for violent drug offenders, those with mental health issues, and veterans, while individuals support punishment-oriented sanctions for domestic violence offenders. Policy implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teachers, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible by Stephen Haff

Reviewed by: Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teachers, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible by Stephen Haff Rogelio Miñana (bio) Stephen Haff. Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teachers, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible. New York: HarperOne, 2020. 304 pp. ISBN: 978-00-6293-406-2. Kid Quixotes is the most revealing and inspiring book on Don Quixote a Cervantes scholar, and for that matter any Cervantes enthusiast, can read. And yet, it is not a scholarly work. It illuminates Cervantes's masterpiece in the most indirect of ways, for it is children in a Brooklyn neighborhood who bring it to life. Since fall of 2016, a group of 15 to 20 children and adolescents ages 5 to 17 have been translating episodes from Don Quixote under the expert guidance of Stephen Haff, a former high school teacher with a degree in theater from Yale University. Haff founded in 2008 an out-of-school educational nonprofit called Still Waters in a Storm that works with children of migrants, mostly Mexican and Ecuadorian, on learning Latin and translating early-modern classics, including Paradise Lost and Don Quixote. As they translate Don Quixote from the original Spanish to contemporary English, they adapt it into a musical play featuring original songs written with the help of accomplished composer Kim Sherman. The resulting play, which also includes some Spanish, updates the old book for our contemporary times with the authenticity and urgency that only children can convey. The Kid Quixote project is in its fifth and last year, pending the delays caused by the pandemic, but Haff vows to continue refining and potentially expanding it for many years to come. The musical play will have a total duration of around 90 minutes. Shorter, incomplete versions have already been performed in the past three winters at several universities in the North East (Columbia, Yale, Georgetown), local consulates, and even in New York's City Hall. A performance at my institution, Drexel University, was recorded and is available on YouTube.com as "The Adventures of Don Quixote." For the duration of the project, until the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted their face to face sessions, the group was meeting three times a week, including a four-hour session every Saturday. Still Waters's rented space, or one-room school as described [End Page 215] in the book's title, is in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, where most of the families live. The barrio used to be mainly Puerto Rican and Dominican but is now majority Mexican and Ecuadorian, with an increasing presence of young Caucasians, often artists and small entrepreneurs. The book is structured around the four songs that articulate the play, titled The Traveling Serialized Adventures of Kid Quixote. Haff skillfully weaves three different periods of his life into each chapter: his own personal family life, growing up in Canada and dealing with the effects of bipolar disorder in his adult life; his tempestuous but rewarding experiences in a Bushwick high school where he founded the Real People Theater company with several of his Puerto Rican students; and his current work at Still Waters. While the book offers many profound insights into life from the margins of society, including Haff's own experience with mental illness; drug violence and abuse at the formerly Puerto Rican-majority high school; and the present struggles of Mexican and Latino migrants under the Trump administration, I focus only on what this book teaches us, Cervantes scholars, on Don Quixote. The four songs each revolve around one episode from the novel, and each cunningly adapt it to the children's reality. Chapter 1, "The Rescuing Song," updates little Andrés' beating at the hands of his master Juan Haldudo (1.4) with a scene in which Stephen Haff himself (an Anglo-Caucasian adult man) beats a brown Latina girl. The violence is re-enacted in an age-appropriate way: In Brechtian style, Haff wields no whip and its hissing and striking is simulated by the chorus of kids. The implications of the children's take on the present political moment in the United States are obvious. In the...

State-Building in the Anglo-Caribbean: Assessing Jamaica's State Formation and Development

In 1962, Jamaica transitioned from being a British colony to a sovereign nation-state. After independence, the country experienced internal and external sociocultural, economic, and political changes that influenced state development. Internally, the political elite, grassroots community organizations, and local strongmen influenced its political stability. Jamaica’s polarized partisan political culture fostered perverse citizen participation alongside a shared “Jamaicanness” identity that helped to build social capital and civic mindedness. Externally, the Cold War sent ideological shock waves through the Americas, and in the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaica fell prey to its violent political consequences. The global shifts brought on by neoliberalism in the late 1970s into the 1980s also had destabilizing economic and political consequences for Jamaica. By the 1980s, with cocaine transshipment from South America through the Caribbean corridor into the United States, Jamaica’s local strongmen upgraded from being partisan middlemen working on behalf of the state to becoming violent drug barons. This metamorphosis had violent consequences for the Jamaican state and society. We explain how these endogenous and exogenous political, economic, and cultural factors contributed to the formation and evolution of the Jamaican

ADVERSITY, MENTAL HEALTH, AND SUBSTANCE USE DISORDERS AS PREDICTORS AND MEDIATORS OF RULE VIOLATIONS IN U.S. PRISONS.

This study explores how typologies of adversity and mental health/substance use disorders impact rule violations during incarceration. Data come from the 2004 cross-sectional Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SI-SFCF). Logistic regression and structural equation modeling were used for analysis. Results link history of adverse experiences to rule violations during incarceration and demonstrate how mental health and substance use disorders mediate this relationship. Incarcerated people with severe histories of adverse experiences had the highest odds of rule violations, relative to people with low adversity, for all typologies. More severe adversity typologies predicted mental health and substance use disorders. Alcohol and substance use disorders predicted drug violations, whereas substance use and mental health disorders predicted major violations. Serious mental illness did not predict rule violations when accounting for adversity. Findings suggest that addressing adverse experiences, mental health, and substance use disorders may prevent rule violations.

Globalization, Yankee Imperialism, and Machismo in the Mexican Narco-Narrativa

Rather than existing in a parallel, disconnected manner from the licit transnational circuits of the global capitalist economy, the transnational drug trade is in fact a core component of this system and one that has to a considerable extent dictated the terms of Mexico’s into this system, as well as the shape of contemporary Mexican society. This has given rise to a sizeable body of narco-narrativas (‘narco-narratives’) which serve as means of textually exploring Mexico’s immediate ‘street-level’ experiences of the transnational flows of capital and goods comprising globalization and the social consequences of the shift towards neoliberal political economy. This essay argues that in doing so these narratives variously confront the shifting social dynamics of neoliberal globalizing Mexico, a U.S. imperialism that takes new forms for a new era, and the culture of machismo that animates Mexican drug cartels. Martin Solares’s Don’t Send Flowers poses this period of rising cartel violence as a second major crisis transforming Mexican society, after the economic collapse and subsequent IMF-mandated structural reforms of 1982, one that runs the risk of simply producing more uneven and socially marginalizing capitalist development. Elmer Mendoza’s The Acid Test, on the other hand, sees a sad inevitability in continuing drug violence and an exiled but not effaced possibility of moral action and leftist populist social reform, while Yuri Herrerra’s Kingdom Cons uses the figure of the drug trafficking kingpin to allegorizes the relationship of art to worldly power and stress the need of art to distance itself from capitalist criminality and propagandistic social functioning.

International Perspectives on the Implications of Cannabis Legalization: A Systematic Review & Thematic Analysis.

The legality, recreational and medical use of cannabis varies widely by country and region but remains largely prohibited internationally. In October 2018, Canada legalized the recreational use of cannabis—a move many viewed as controversial. Proponents of legalization have emphasized the potential to eradicate the marijuana black market, improve quality and safety control, increase tax revenues, improve the availability of medical cannabis, and lower gang-related drug violence. Conversely, opponents of legalization have stressed concerns about cannabis’ addictive potential, second-hand cannabis exposure, potential exacerbation of underlying and established mental illnesses, as well as alterations in perception that affect safety, particularly driving. This systematic review synthesizes recent international literature on the clinical and public health implications of cannabis legalization.