They are resilient, opportunistic and involved in a wide range of serious crimes, including drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion, firearms offences and high-level violence. Current responses to the drug problem. Australian threshold quantities for drug trafficking: Are they placing drug users at risk of unjustified sanction? SYDNEY (Reuters) - Dutch authorities have arrested 57-year old Canadian national Tse Chi Lop at the request of the Australia Federal Police after a long probe into drug trafficking in . Web. The Offence of Trafficking in a Controlled Drug. In September 2019, when he and five other people tried to travel to Panama, they were denied entry due to the blue notice and simply returned to Colombia. Australian trends in ecstasy and related drug markets 2011. The pair was refused police bail and . Further data on the frequency of high consumption and high purchasing behaviours is also needed. The fact that this is how police and prosecutors operate in Queensland, France and most other criminal justice systems (Hughes 2010a) shows this is not only possible but a more common practice. More generally, the findings suggest that instances of users exceeding the threshold quantity identified would be much less problematic if the threshold quantity were not also linked to the deemed supply laws. The U.S. and Australian police jointly handled the case, uncovered an international drug trafficking syndicate, and intercepted 2.4 metric tons of cocaine on a ship bound for Australia off the coast of South America, with a market value of up to 1 billion Australian dollars (approximately NT$20.6 billion). In Australia, the issue of drug trafficking thresholds has risen to the fore, mainly in the context of concern about the lack of consistency across drug quantities in different state systems. The upper quantities were checked with a number of key experts (n=6) to verify if they were within the maximum range that could be consumed in a single continuous session of use without sleep. More than five terabytes of data, including more than five million emails and tens of thousands of documents, were hacked and held in a password-protected database in August. Melbourne crime figure Tony Mokbel has been taken to hospital in Geelong from Victoria's high-security . Most Australian states and territories employ three different thresholdsa trafficable threshold (that distinguishes crimes of low-level trafficking versus possession for personal use), a commercial threshold and a large commercial threshold (Hughes 2010b). Criminal gangs are highly visible crime entities, with a presence in all Australian states and territories and overseas. Over the past 50 years, levels of apparent consumption of different alcoholic beverages changed substantially. The views expressed are the responsibility of the authors and not necessarily those of the Commonwealth. StudyCorgi. The detainee was interrogated, and his phone was examined to find his accomplices. Our research can be found in: Hughes, C.E., Cowdery, N. & Ritter, A. Proponents of the use of threshold quantities argue that they are the optimal means to guarantee that drug offenders receive the sanction that they deserve (MCCOC 1998b; Sentencing Council 2011). Legal thresholds for serious drug offences: Expert advice to the ACT on determining amounts for trafficable, commercial and large commercial drug offences. As the country enters the current decade, it has the ambition of becoming a modern . A number of laws are employed for sanctioning alleged drug traffickers in Australia, but most jurisdictions also have laws to sanction solely on the weight of the drug found. Another name for this crime is drug distribution. Thus, the launch of drones is a highly effective and comprehensive method of surveillance abroad from the air. NDARC is supported by funding from the Australian Government. Drug trafficking examples typically take the form of more illicit, or scheduled, drugs, like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines. a: Threshold quantities in these jurisdictions are listed per pure gram (shown in brackets). The syndicate also has the ability to impregnate cocaine into items like plastic tables and mobile phones. DPMP monograph series no. "These markets, for being so lucrative, become of interest to transnational criminal organisations, trafficking drugs to the Pacific," he said. A joint U.S. and Australian law enforcement operation busted an international drug ring after intercepting 2.4 tonnes of cocaine aboard a vessel off the coast of South America that had been bound . Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 27(1), 1-20.. Dr Caitlin Hughes, Nicholas Cowdery AM, QC and Professor Alison Ritter, Copyright 2023 UNSW MEDICINE - National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, Authorised by National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre - The process by which these institutions fulfill their duties is to control borders, gather information, investigate criminal networks, implement anti-smuggling technologies, and prosecute members of professional smuggling groups. Moreover, when there is a suspicion that a certain person may be transporting narcotics, it produces a prompt response. Hughes C & Ritter A in press. Dealing and trafficking in illegal drugs (like heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis) are serious criminal offences. Analysis was confined to examining the thresholds for heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, MDMA (also known as ecstasy) and cannabis (leaf not whole plant form). From opium to marijuana to cocaine, a variety of substances have been illegally imported, sold and distributed throughout U.S . Chill Now? The broader project examined this issue in two different wayswhether the thresholds are designed to filter traffickers from users and whether they enable appropriate sanctioning of traffickers of different controlled drugs. Add languages. If you use an assignment from StudyCorgi website, it should be referenced accordingly. The logistical elasticity of criminal gangs prevents national authorities from responding quickly to problems and eliminating them. Sleazy ex-cop Tom Booker, 28, has pleaded guilty to more than 50 charges of drug trafficking and money laundering. Queensland, commonly known as one of Australia's most conservative states with historically harsh anti-drug laws, has recently eased off its punitive approach and proposed dramatic law reforms for personal drug use. When these drugs land in Australia - up to 70 per cent are connected to Myanmar they are potentially fetching upwards of wholesale $100,000 per kilogram. Thousands of kilograms of illegal substances cross international borders daily, entering the lives of drug dealers and addicts. Sevigny EL & Caulkins JP 2006. Police in PNG sayoutdatedlaws have left them unable to lay drug charges against the Australian manager of a Port Moresby hotel where an alleged clandestine meth lab and illegal firearms were discovered. With this knowledge, I have experimented and identified spatial data patterns of vessel behaviors and recognized and implemented innovative models to identify Illegal Unregulated Unreported fishing activities (IUU), Maritime crime activities such as smuggling, drug trafficking, human trafficking (especially Australia), and rescue distress . Drug trafficking in Australia is deemed a very serious offence, one for which legislators and courts have ruled general deterrence is paramount and 'little mercy' should be shown (Clune [1989] VR 567, O'Bryan and Marks JJ, 576). "Australia and New Zealand's prolific and high-profile organised crimenetworks including outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs) haveexpanded their activities offshore and into the Pacific. High-Level Drug Trafficking in Australia. This type of law, which has existed since the 1970s in eight of nine Australian jurisdictions1 is called deemed supply. Learn all out drug trafficking law here. These surveys provide data on patterns of drug use (under both typical and heavy use sessions), purchasing behaviour, typical street prices and a number of other user and market characteristics. You are free to use it to write your own assignment, however you must reference it properly. There are 5 different quantity ranges under the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act. What is also problematic is to grab an entire syndicate of smugglers, not just one member (OReilly et al., 2020). The findings suggest that users are at minimal risk of exceeding the trafficable thresholds when they follow typical use and purchase patterns, but that when using or purchasing high doses many can exceed the thresholds for their personal use alone. A 47-year-old man from Queensland and a 64-year-old man from South Australia were arrested at Henley Beach and have been charged with trafficking a large commercial quantity of a controlled drug. Malins, P. (2019). The possibility of being detected and apprehended by customs and law enforcement authorities forces illegal groups to resort to special purchase costs associated with additional disguises and cover-ups. Police Detective . This is due to gaps in knowledge about the frequency of high use and purchase behaviour. This is particularly when compared with the sanction for simple use or possessiona maximum of two years imprisonment or a more probably, a simple caution or diversion (and no criminal record; Hughes & Ritter 2008). Singapore on Thursday executed two men for drug trafficking, ignoring pleas for mercy from human rights campaigners who fear "a new wave" of hangings in the Asian city state notorious . Australian frontier authorities and customs patrol borders, airports, and ports on a regular. However, this is a complex process, and customs authorities usually seem to expose only a few personalities while others adapt to new conditions. Page Last Updated: . Our Breaking News Alert will notify you of significant breaking news when it happens. OReilly, M. J. This is particularly true in this case as, across all states, it is users of MDMA who are most at risk of unjustified sanctiona drug that when compared across both licit and illicit drugs has been shown to be least likely to cause crime or health and societal harm (Nutt, King & Phillips 2010). This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced. Structural and functional changes in an Australian high-level drug trafficking network after exposure to supply changes. On the threshold: How relevant should quantity be in determining intent to supply. 22. Can the dogs of Chernobyl teach us new tricks when it comes to our own survival? * Hyperlink the URL after pasting it to your document, Revising Principles of Providing a High Standard and Safe Working Environment, Mitigating Civilian Casualties in Densely Populated Areas, Judicial Process on Criminals: Hoagland Case, Federal Mental Health Parity Laws and Regulations, Palliative Care and Hospice Education Bill Advocacy, Rittenhouse Case Highlights the Nations Deep Division. This paper was written and submitted to our database by a student to assist your with your own studies. For each state, the ability of the legal threshold to successfully filter out drug users from drug traffickers (ie the reasonableness of the assumption that all who exceed the trafficable threshold warrant severe charge/sanction for trafficking) was examined using two metrics of the quantity of drug a user is likely to possess for personal use alone: Metric 1: User patterns of use; that is, quantity of drugs that a user is likely to possess for a single session of personal use. A., Hughes, C. E., Bright, D. A., & Ritter, A. The article states that the successful opening of the drug business system is a continuation of the victorious action against drug trafficking and its importation into Australia. Cannabis, and possibly ecstasy, are among the few drugs that could be taxed and regulated. Australian authorities shared intelligence with their Colombian counterparts relating to the kingpins distribution of methamphetamine, MDMA and heroin trafficked into Perth via criminal networks in the Middle East and South-East Asia. Meanwhile, "narco-corruption" in the Pacific "compromised institutions and individuals across key agencies, such as customs, policeand immigration,and undermined the rule of law". The final quantities were then compared against the actual trafficable thresholds to identify for each drug and state two thingsfirst, whether most users consume less than the threshold quantity in a single continuous session of use (using median and mean estimates) and second, whether there is risk to any users of an unjustified charge/conviction; that is, whether the maximum possessed is equal to or greater than the trafficable threshold. They use this knowledge to find the least controlled way and efficiently deliver the required goods. Under such a situation, circumstances where users exceed the thresholds would be much less troubling, as in the absence of any additional evidence of trafficking intent, the user would be appropriately charged with a simple possession offence (and liable to a much smaller maximum penalty eg 2 years imprisonment). Lawbreakers skillfully collect counterintelligence data on the operational activities of customs and frontier guards and traffic current models to determine optimal boundary crossing times. KATHMANDU, March 4: The Australian Federal Police has arrested two Nepali youths for their involvement in drug trafficking. Specific goals of relevance for this paper were to: The method replicated the approach of Hughes and Ritter (in press). Due to the undercover nature and absence of provable data on this issue, it is challenging to estimate the market area of the trade with perfect correctness (Hughes et al., 2020). Please try again later. Yet, in spite of known risks from adopting such thresholds, particularly of an unjustified conviction of a user as a trafficker, the capacity of Australian legal thresholds to deliver proportional sanctioning has been subject to limited research to date. Walsh C 2008. Thus, they initiated the investigation of the Victorian Joint Task Force on Organized Crime. This process was repeated for Metric 2 using data from the IDRS and EDRS only (data on purchasing was unavailable from the NDSHS). That said, legal thresholds are used primarily to facilitate responses to high-level offenders; that is, drug traffickers. The AFP, which was first made aware of the data breach when it was contacted by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on October 4, is attempting to stem potential damage to its operations. Two additional solutions are suggested. Vietnam has met most of the Millennium Development Goals (Australian Government 2018; United Nations Viet Nam 2017). Nevertheless, in all Australian states and territories, possession of the base-level threshold quantities triggers elevated maximum penalty ranges. Guacamaya invites the peoples of Abya Yala (an Indigenous name for Central and South America) to hack and filter these systems of repression, domination and enslavement that dominate us, and that it be the peoples who decide to find a way to free us from state terrorism, their statement said. Drug checking could replace drug sniffer dogs at youth music events. "High-Level Drug Trafficking in Australia." The profit that remained in Australia's economy was about $5 billion. The fentanyl . To provide added surety that estimates were derived from users not user-dealers, purchase amounts from offenders who reported any dealing for cash profit in the last month were excluded. Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in Australia. Caitlin Hughes, Alison Ritter and Benjamin Phillips are from the Drug Policy Modelling Program, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, The University of New South Wales. (2021). (2023) 'High-Level Drug Trafficking in Australia'. High-Level Drug Trafficking in Australia. Indeed, with one exception, the maximum quantities reported by cannabis users were 3.535 times under the threshold. They also conflict with standard criminal justice principles, such as the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof being placed on the prosecutor, rather than the defendant (Judicial College of Victoria 2012). Secret agents targeting drug cartels in Australia exposed in data hack. For MDMA, under typical conditions, most users again reported consuming less than the thresholds. There has been an increasing push for all states and territories to adopt the proposed threshold quantities (AGD 2011; NDS 2007). Australia is strongly committed to countering people smuggling and human trafficking. "In a region plagued by 'unmet development challenges', transnational crime and illicit drugs are a cross-cutting threat to development, securityand governance in the Pacific," the report said. If Australia starts moving from criminal to civil penalties for drugs, the thresholds for drug offences will need to be raised and the severity of criminal sanctions reduced. The kingpin, who fled the country in 2018 and now lives in Colombia with his wife, has 17 registered companies in his name. Such laws mean that possession of the trafficable threshold amount will constitute a presumption of trafficking placing the onus on the alleged offender to prove that the possessed amount was not for the purposes of trafficking (deemed supply).