Drug Trafficking

Drug trafficking can include the sale, large-scale purchase, cultivation, manufacture, processing, and transportation of illegal, addictive, and sometimes mind-altering drugs. Drug trafficking is often thought of more specifically as the illegal transportation of narcotics for profit, often from one country to another, but also within a country. It is highly profitable, in part, because governments prohibit or heavily regulate drugs. This makes them more difficult to acquire (reduces supply), thus increasing price and profits for drug traffickers. Drug trafficking is risky because law enforcement hunts for traffickers and their wares and enforces stiff penalties on those it catches, and this serves to further increase drug trafficking profitability. Organized crime groups often carry out drug trafficking. Those that make a bulk of their profits from it ...