Social Prevention of Drug Trafficking Crimes

Klavdiya Kirillovna Vasilyeva

, Darya Nikolaevna Krotova

and Osor Rygzynovich Ochirov

2,3 c

Research Institute of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia, st. Narvskaya, 15A, bldg. 1, Moscow, Russian Federation

Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, bldg. 36, Stremyanny Lane, Moscow, Russian Federation

National Research University High School of Economics, st. Myasnitskaya, 20, Moscow, Russian Federation

Keywords: Problem behavior under the influence of substances, social prevention of drug-related crime and offenses,

national strategy to combat poverty and social exclusion, entertaining type of drug use, problem type of drug

use.

Abstract: Based on the translation of authentic materials, an overview of research programs of Western European

government organizations and nongovernmental centers for the social prevention of drug-related crime and

offenses is presented. The goal and objectives of the research are to identify the essence, content of social

prevention of drug-related crimes and offenses, conducted in Western Europe, as well as to identify the ways,

forms of its implementation and the reasons for the emergence of this form of prevention. The methodology

was made up of the object and contextual approaches of research in combination with positivist, descriptive

and axiological values. As a result of the research, the essence, content, nature of social prevention of drug-

related crimes and offenses have been identified, as well as the forms and methods of its implementation. The

novelty of the research lies in identifying the context of the cause of this social prevention emergence.

1 INTRODUCTION

Chapter 25 of the Criminal Code of the Russian

Federation (hereinafter referred to as the Criminal

Code of the Russian Federation), like the legislation

of any state, classifies illegal acts related to drug

trafficking as crimes. The modern world practice of

combating drug addiction is guided by the prohibitive

and restrictive principles of opposing the spread and

consumption of drugs. At the same time, in a number

of European states in recent years, in addition to the

direct fight against drug addiction, socially oriented

prevention of such crimes and offenses is being

performed in a targeted manner. With regard to

Russian reality, according to Russian criminologists,

"... preventive work is performed by the method of

attacks, swoops” and at the same time methods are

used that relate to the cognitive sphere of the psyche,

acting under the principle of “understand”,

“remember”, “know”, etc. Meanwhile, as Russian

scientists write, drug addiction has long been

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recognized as a bio-psycho-social disease affecting

the value aspects of human life. All this, according to

experts, constitutes the main problem of the drug

situation in our country (Khagurov T.A.,

Pozdnyakova V.N., Rakachev L.N., Rybakova T.V.,

Chekineva A.P., Reznik S.Yu., Lyubin N.V.,

Meleshko E.A., Voinova N.E., Khagurova N.E.,

2014).

According to M. Pozdnyakova and V. Bruno, the

process of drug addiction, changing normative

perceptions, as well as social attitudes of the

population in relation to drugs are interdependent

phenomena. In modern Russia, as in the rest of the

world, there is “... liberalization of attitudes towards

drugs - the admissibility of the use of certain

substances, but only under certain conditions (for

example, the use of substances that are “safe” from

the consumer’s point of view; control over the

frequency, dosage and quality of substances;

compliance with certain rules of admission, etc.)”

(Pozdnyakova M.E., Bruno V.V., 2018). For some

Vasilyeva, K., Krotova, D. and Ochirov, O.

Social Prevention of Drug Trafﬁcking Crimes.

DOI: 10.5220/0010627500003152

In Proceedings of the VII International Scientiﬁc-Practical Conference “Criminal Law and Operative Search Activities: Problems of Legislation, Science and Practice” (CLOSA 2021), pages

33-37

ISBN: 978-989-758-532-6; ISSN: 2184-9854

time it is common to speak of the role of the so-called

"controlled" consumption of psychoactive

substances. Meanwhile, according to the cited

authors, “controlled” consumption is at the very core

of the drug situation (Ibid.).

For 2020 in the Russian Federation, 189.9

thousand crimes were registered related to the

narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances or their

analogues, potent substances, new potentially

dangerous psychoactive substances trafficking In the

aggregate structure of crimes, the share of illegal

production, sale, transfer, acquisition, storage,

transportation, manufacture, processing, as well as

violations of the rules for the narcotic drugs or

psychotropic substances amounted to 182.6 thousand.

Of these, sales - 112,267, production - 500,

smuggling (Article 229.1 of the Criminal Code of the

Russian Federation) - 362. As a result of the

operational-search activity, 100,975 crimes were

solved and 83.1 thousand persons who had committed

crimes were identified. Despite the positive trend

towards a decrease in the number of crimes in

comparison with 2016 - 201.2 thousand, the problem

of combating drug crimes continues to remain

relevant.

Decree of the President of the Russian Federation

No. 733 dated November 23, 2020 “On Approval of

the Strategy of the State Anti-Drug Policy of the

Russian Federation for the Period up to 2030”

presupposes goals, objectives, and measures for its

implementation. Within the context of our discourse,

we drew attention to the following tasks of anti-drug

policy: improving the scientific support of anti-drug

activities and the formation on a common

methodological basis of a single system of a

comprehensive anti-drug policy.

Hypothesis: social prevention of drug-related

crimes and offenses has arisen due to the fact that

recently the countries of Western Europe are

experiencing an ever-increasing immigration burden.

2 MATERIALS AND METHODS

The materials of our research were government

research projects and reports, which present the

experience of social prevention of drug addiction in

Western Europe. Project “The social prevention of

drug-related crime (2018) (SCOPREV) (DR/00/75):

Results & recommendations” (abbreviated -

SCOPREV), developed with the financial support of

the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office

(BELSPO). Scientists were interested in new research

projects developed in Belgium and neighboring

countries - in Germany, France, Luxembourg and

Switzerland (Pauwels, L.; Vander Laenen, F.; Maes,

E.; Mine, B.; De Kock, 2018).

We have translated English and French texts,

which present the experience of combating and social

prevention of drug-related crimes. An object

approach and contextual analysis of the textual

content of project materials, reports and

recommendations were made.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

“Abstaining from drugs cannot be the goal” strategy:

pros and cons. The drug-related strategy fits into a

wide context and is consistent with all government

programs in all departments - says Louis Favril and

his colleagues (Favril L., Vander Laenen, F. &

Decorte, T., 2015). The strategy should have a

holistic approach, including drug addiction as a

problem that needs to be addressed, where possible,

on a broader social, socio-economic and socio-

political platform. Withdrawal from drugs cannot be

a goal for every user, – the same authors write. They

note that supervised heroin provision and drug

substitution are more effective in reducing drug-

related crime than referring patients to treatment

waiting lists. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a

strategy to reduce drug harm, namely, to create

substitution therapy. The essence of substitution

therapy: 1) providing drug users with premises; 2)

provision of controlled (medical) heroin; 3) providing

users with needle exchange. As we can see, in

Western Europe, the tendency to abandon the

categorical ban on drug consumption continues to

grow. However, not all scientists and specialists hold

this position. Opponents of the drug harm reduction

strategy believe that its advocates do not consider the

possible criminal consequences of such a position.

Analysis of materials from research projects and

scientific literature shows that the international

European community of criminologists is

experiencing serious difficulties in determining the

signs of drug trafficking crimes. This circumstance

creates an obstacle to the effectiveness of anti-drug

activities of state bodies. The European Monitoring

Center for Drugs and Drug Addition (EMCDDA) is a

non-governmental, legally independent body

established in 1993 by the EU countries to collect and

analyze factual information on drugs and drug

addiction. This center offered several definitions of

drug crime, but they were never considered

satisfactory by experts. Therefore, due to conceptual

uncertainty, there are discrepancies in police reports

CLOSA 2021 - VII INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE “CRIMINAL LAW AND OPERATIVE SEARCH

ACTIVITIES: PROBLEMS OF LEGISLATION, SCIENCE AND PRACTICE”

and, accordingly, in assessments of social prevention

projects. Therefore, hardly anyone understands, both

in Belgium and in other countries of the European

Union, about the scale and prevalence of drug-related

crimes - the following authors write (Cauchy D.,

Madriaza, P., Monnier, C., Martel-Perron, R., Robert-

Colomby, J., Benzacar, N. & Modica, C., 2015).

Meanwhile, the number of drug-related convictions,

for example, in Belgium, increased by 16.5%

between 2005 and 2014, and this type of crime is now

one of the five of all reported violations (Plettinckx

E., Antoine, J., Gremeaux L. & Van Oyen, H., 2017).

The only certainty of international research on this

issue lies in the conclusion that drug-related crime

consists mainly of psychopharmacological and

economic coercion (Cauchy D., Madriaza, P.,

Monnier, C., Martel-Perron, R., Robert-Colomby, J.,

Benzacar, N. & Modica, C., 2015).

The EMCDDA reports note that there is no

common definition of drug-related public harm

either. In cases when it comes to real deviant

behavior, in practice it is not considered as such, i.e.

is not recognized as deviant. If the behavior is defined

as deviant, then it is recognized as a consequence of

the application of “highly codified and highly

institutionalized rules of law”. Moreover, the fact that

behavior is recognized as deviant is more often seen

as elements of bias (Pauwels, L.; Vander Laenen, F.,

Maes, E., Mine, B., De Kock, 2018). In general, value

judgments prevail about the drug user behavior as

undesirable behavior, or as unpleasant, or as

annoying, etc. More often the wording is less definite

and non-binding - “problem behavior under the

influence of a substance”. According to some

European EMCDDA studies, such judgments are the

result of a lack of a cognitive, conceptual vision of the

real threat from drug addiction to society. In this

context, the EMCDDA (2005) report on public drug-

related harm notes that Belgium is one of the few

countries that, along with Ireland, Luxembourg, the

Netherlands and the United Kingdom, has identified

this type of harm as a key target of government drug

policy. Finally, the report concludes that there are no

reliable criteria for assessing drug harm indicators in

European countries, which significantly complicates

the objective measurement of this phenomenon

(Ibid.).

In the context of uncertainty in the criteria for

assessing drug harm, options are proposed for

following the drug harm reduction strategy. For this,

the authors of the SCOPREV project believe, it is

necessary to change mental ideas and attitudes. It is

necessary to abandon the traditional charitable

psychology of helping, which is akin to a handout, to

move on to recognizing a person as a subject of law.

Provide him with access to basic rights, namely,

compulsory minimum income, health insurance, the

right to housing, to fight eviction or over-

indebtedness, protection from violence, caring for

isolated foreign minors (Collett Dukech, Frédéric

Penot, 2015). A naturalistic approach to risk-based

prevention is proposed by researcher D.P. Farrington

(Farrington D.P., 2009). The identified risk factors

are neutralized by a directed strengthening of their

counteraction (Ibid.), including specific prevention of

risk factors for penitentiary crime (Krotova D.N.,

Debolsky M.G., 2013). It is true that prevention has a

rather polysemantic interpretation. There is a very

wide range of preventive impact on the offender, both

potential and actual - from the prevention of drug

addiction among adolescents to the preventive impact

on the penitentiary offender (Bykov A.V., Zenin S.S.,

Kudryashov O.V., 2017; Vasilyeva KK, Ovchinnikov

SN, 2018; Vasilyeva KK, Ochirov OR, 2017).

“Social prevention of drug-related crimes and

offenses” The main goal of the project “Social

prevention of drug-related crime and offenses”

(hereinafter - Social prevention) was to find

promising practices for social prevention of drug-

related crime in Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia

(Strebelle C., 2002; Prevention of drug-related crime

report, June, 2015).

A group of researchers (Cauchy D., Madriaza, P.,

Monnier, C., Martel-Perron, R., Robert-Colomby, J.,

Benzacar, N. & Modica, C., 2015) proposed a

typology of drug use prevention: primary, secondary

and tertiary. Primary prevention contains programs to

educate and alert the general public, including young

people, about domestic or school violence. Such

programs are aimed at those who have never been

abused or involved in the criminal justice system.

Secondary prevention focuses on those who are at

potential risk of becoming involved in criminal

activities. It contains programs agreed and tested by

social services, the education system or the justice

system. Tertiary prevention includes programs for

those registered with the criminal justice system to

prevent reoffending.

We asked the question: how is the social nature of

drug crime prevention understood in Western

Europe? Since drugs were originally an attempt to

solve some obsessive urgent problem even before

they became the problem itself, it is necessary to find

approaches to the problems of drug addiction and take

into account the various vicissitudes of life leading to

this addiction. The strategy should take into account

what type of consumption the given addiction belongs

to - whether it is entertaining or problematic. It is

Social Prevention of Drug Trafﬁcking Crimes

important to know that a person may continue to use

drugs for reasons other than those that prompted him

to start using drugs for the first time.

We found out that in Western Europe the social

nature of prevention has a specific feature. From the

project materials, we explicated the essence of social

prevention of drug-related crimes and offenses as the

fight against poverty and social exclusion (Pauwels,

L.; Vander Laenen, F.; Maes, E.; Mine, B.; De Kock,

2018; Collett Dukech, Frédéric Penot, 2015).

Naturally, the question arises: why poverty and social

exclusion are markers of potential drug addiction and

criminalization of society? The Burgundian

Recommendations (Collett Dukech, Frédéric Penot,

2015), which, in fact, are a national strategy to

combat poverty and social exclusion, note the growth

of social inequality in society, emphasize the need to

respect the racial and religious diversity of the

individual. The authors of the document advocate

giving the strategy of social prevention the state status

and to solve the problems of social prevention at the

interstate level.

An important component of prevention is the

priority of the collective form of social work.

Individual actions are recognized as ineffective,

because the “ethnicity” of the population of the

neighborhoods remains outside the focus of social

prevention, the document emphasizes (Ibid, 2015).

The “ethnicity” of the neighborhoods population

refers to the immigrants, whose stay in a number of

Western European countries leads them to

unintentional “ghettoization” - an objectively

observed process of segregation of the immigrant

groups places of residence according to certain

criteria - ethnic, religious, income level, etc.

The growing immigration burden has led to the

creation of social prevention of drug-related crimes

and offenses. The process of European migration, as

known, tends to “live its own life”, in other words, the

immigrants are often not respect the state regulation

of the recipient country. This is evidenced by the

immigration situation in Germany, where, as known,

there is a strictly legislative definition of the place of

allocation of immigrants in accordance with the

capabilities and needs of the state. However, the

attractiveness of the three western states of Germany

(North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Baden-

Württemberg), which are the most favoured and

therefore attractive, exceeds 60% of all foreigners in

Germany (Karachurina L.B., 2008). Immigrants, as a

rule, are deprived of material and other opportunities

for normal life. Therefore, social prevention is aimed

primarily at solving the problem of a hand-to-mouth

existence of those to whom it is addressed. It is known

that these are primarily immigrants. However, no

direct designation of immigrants as the main objects

of social prevention is found in the materials cited by

us. This is probably due to the need to comply with

political correctness. Indirect facts that we mentioned

above testify in favor of immigrants as the main

objects of social prevention. To get an idea of

immigration, its socio-legal category and size, we

present data for Germany for the period 1991-2008.

During this period, 9 legal categories of migrants

arrived in Germany - from EU member states -

2,194,796; family reunification - (since 1998) total -

705,234; late immigrants by blood Germans

(including family members) total - 2103,019;

immigrants along the Jewish line (since 1993) -

202,127; asylum applicants - 2101,854; labor

migrants under an employment contract - 755,335;

seasonal migrants - 4406,898; IT specialists since

2000 - 28,093 (no data for 2005); educational

migrants (since 1993) - 714,584 TOTAL:

13,211,940 people (Skornyakov I.A., 2011).

The European states authorities take the wave of

immigrants for granted and, in the current conditions,

are taking preventive measures, which include social

prevention.

European researchers concluded: 1) the strategy

should take into account that drug addiction is the

result of many reasons; 2) it is necessary to return the

political component to prevention activities; 3)

guided by the fact of the connection between the

social exclusion of an individual and his addictive

disorders, it is necessary to direct social work to

reduce and level the marginalization of a person; 4) it

is necessary to take into account what type of

consumption this drug addiction belongs to -

entertaining or problematic; 5) the fight against drug

addiction should not be exclusively prohibitive; 6)

abstinence cannot be a goal for all people with drug

addiction problems and therefore a strategy to reduce

drug harm is needed.

4 CONCLUSIONS

According to the objective principle of researching

the essence and content of the strategy of “social

prevention of drug-related crimes and offenses”, the

article authors came to the understanding that the

main causal factor that determined the formation of

social prevention is the increase in immigration to

Western Europe. The need to streamline and regulate

immigration processes in Europe gave rise to such an

interstate social phenomenon as “social prevention of

drug-related crimes and offenses”.

CLOSA 2021 - VII INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE “CRIMINAL LAW AND OPERATIVE SEARCH

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The essence of social prevention is, firstly, the

fight against poverty and social exclusion; secondly,

its target audience is, first of all, immigrants; thirdly,

social prevention is a proactive measure of the

potential criminalization of European recipient

countries. The content of social prevention is the

development of a strategy to combat poverty and

social exclusion, which consists of specific forms and

methods of assistance to the poor and disadvantaged.

The emergence of social prevention is associated with

the fact that the primary cause of an individual's drug

addiction is not a personal, individual factor, as was

believed in the recent past, but an external - social,

public factor. Recognition of the social, public factor

as the primary cause of drug addiction confirms our

conclusion about immigration as the main incentive

for social prevention of drug-related crimes and

offenses.

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