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36 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (2001)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc36 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime, Law & Social Change 36: 1-20, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Foreword On the inestimable value of the OGD ALAN A. BLOCK Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA (e-mail: aab5@psu.edu) I first met Alain Labrousse some time in the late 1980s. He came to my house in State College, Pennsylvania, to tell me about his amazing venture titled the Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues (OGD). Alain was (and continues to be) a modest man with an immodest idea. He actually thought to create a world-wide network of individuals committed to investigating drug production, trafficking, and political corruption. This produced a news- letter entitled The Geopolitical Drug Dispatch which month after month, year after year, covered the netherworld of drugs and attendant woes. Let me give just a couple of examples. The first edition came out in November 1991 and had reports from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The reports included Balkan Route Fuels War, Albanian and Croatian Net- works, Poppy 91 in the USSR, Syrian Crack-Down and Racketeering, Guinea-Liberia Cannabis Wars, and BCCI: Heroin Money, etc. It was a revelation. In November 1999, issue 95 was distributed. It had reports on money-laundering in The Netherlands, drug labs and collaborators in Burma, the Tamil Tigers' links to India's Mafia, Cocaine Galore in the Congo, and from Venezuela the Warao People Poisoned by Cocaine. Part of Alain's inspiration came from his years as a researcher in South America. Thus, along that way, Alain wrote books such as Tujamaros, guer- illa urbaine en Uruguay (1971), L'Experience chilienne, reformisme ou re- volution (1972), L'Argentine, revolution et contre-revolution, with Francoise Geze, (1975), Sur le chemin des Andes, a la rencontre du monde indien (1983), La drogue, l'argent et les armes (1981), and many others. At the turn of the decade, Alain and his organization put together an in- credible conference in Paris. I was invited along with Alfred McCoy, and at my suggestion, attorney Jack Blum. The product of this conference, which was held in a Parisian building with outside elevators that rocketed its con- tents to the 20th floor or perhaps higher, was the book La Planete Des Drogues: Organisations criminelles, guerres et blanchiment (1993). Jack Blum and I contributed Le blanchiment de 1'argent aux Antilles: Bahamas, Sint Maarten et iles Caimans, and Alfred McCoy wrote Trafic de l'heroine et politique

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