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To reduce the number of women being sentenced to death, this chapter explores and critically reflects on the calls being made by women’s rights activists in Southeast Asia for cross-border drug trafficking to be reconstituted as human trafficking. Drawing on interviews with a range of stakeholders, alongside information on 146 cases of women sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia, this chapter shows that the gendered dynamics of drug trafficking can indeed be understood as a form of human trafficking. However, there are concerns from a feminist activist perspective in representing it in these terms because the discourse of human trafficking, has been used by the patriarchal state to legitimize racialized and gendered oppression of women at borders. This has ramifications in terms of human rights, particularly with regards to women’s right to freedom of movement as well as the right to livelihood.

Inequality of rights, wage gaps, and gender stereotypes are the context in which women in Latin America live, aggravating their situation of poverty. Under this scenario, drug trafficking is presented as a legitimate job offer as an answer to women’s economic needs. Currently, drug trafficking not only categorizes women as merchandise for sexual services but also integrates professional, technical, and logistical services within the criminal structures.

This research follows a qualitative methodology, making a documentary review to identify the role of women in drug trafficking. As partial results, it is evident that women recognize that gender gaps are not solved by their insertion in the drug trafficking economy, because they must perform jobs that put them at greater risk with the authorities, but they do solve an economic need.

As in other parts of the world, the ‘war on drugs’ in West Africa has led to significant focus on criminal justice, compromising public health and human rights without reducing the scale of drug trafficking, production and use. West Africa is not only a transit zone, local production and consumption continue to rise unabated. The Economic Community of West African States has described drug issues as the enemy of the state and the rule of law, and has called on members States to fight the ‘scourge’.

The failure of the current policies has been vividly documented by the West Africa Commission on Drugs through its 2014 report titled ‘‘Not Just in Transit: Drugs, the State and Society in West Africa’’.

In response, civil society organisations and activists have contributed to raising awareness of the harm being caused by the current repressive drug policies in West Africa and engaged their respective national governments in evidence-based drug policy reform.

These engagements culminated in regional consultations that gave birth to the West African Common Position for the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) with a call for harm reduction and an evidence based drug policy for the region. Unfortunately, the UNGASS outcome was not as revolutionary as expected by the West African progressive voices, who have therefore continued to engage their governments to make the 2019 High Level Ministerial segment a turning point in the global drug debate.

Parallel with trends in the wider East Africa region, there has been an increase in the number of women involved in drug use, trafficking and drug-related crime in Kenya (Beckerleg, Telfer, & Hundt, 2005 ). Vulnerable populations, such as domestic labourers, ethnic minorities, those living in slums, bar attendants, sex workers and refugees, are recruited into criminal organisations and assigned roles that expose them to negative health outcomes, human rights violations and incarceration (NACADA, 2016 ). In cases where women do not directly participate in drug use or the drug trade, they often are responsible for mitigating the risks arising from drug use by family members and the community. This reflects their triple burden of care and support when family and social life deteriorates (Mburu, Limmer, & Holland 2019).

The Kenya Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Control Act of 1994, criminalises possession and trafficking of illicit drugs. The enforcement of this legislation has led to an increase in the number of women incarcerated in Kenya for drug, but also (and mainly) alcohol offences. This goes against the recommendation of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 2005 that States should adopt innovative measures and policies that prioritise treatment and rehabilitation as opposed to incarceration. In Kenya, prisons have adopted the Mandela and Bangkok Rules, enabling a paradigm shift in the provision of correctional services for women offenders, including remote parenting, family open days and linkages to aftercare services. However, these policies need to be anchored in the legal framework, with adequate resources to hasten the realisation of goals for the care and treatment of female drug and criminal offenders.

Criminal law has dramatically expanded since the 1970s. Despite popular and academic attention to overcriminalization in the United States, empirical research on how court actors and, in particular, prosecutors, use the legal tools associated with overcriminalization is scarce. In this chapter, we describe three forms of overcriminalization that, in theory, have created new tools for prosecutors: the criminalization of new behaviors, mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, and the internal expansion of criminal laws. We then use a unique dataset of felony filings and dispositions in Florida from 1995 to 2015 to test a series of hypotheses examining how overcriminalization influences prosecutorial practices given three changes to the political economy during this time: the decline in violent and property crime, the Great Recession, and a growing call for criminal justice reform. We find that prosecutors have been unconstrained by declining crime rates. Yet, rather than rely on new criminal statutes or mandatory minimum sentence laws, they maintained their caseloads by increasing their filing rates for traditional violent, property and drug offenses. At the same time, the data demonstrate nonviolent other offenses are the top charge in almost 20% of the felony caseload between 2005 and 2015. Our findings also suggest that, despite reform rhetoric, filing and conviction rates decreased due to the Recession, not changes in the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal justice reform.

For Colombia, cocaine is a product that is sold for profit in the United States. Mainstream political economy, let alone the other social sciences, has little to say about the process of extraction of surplus value in the production and distribution of cocaine, in other words, how cocaine is exploited for profit. The paper argues that the conventional framework, which locates profits generated from the cocaine trade in an economic model of crime shields a much deeper reality than simply ‘money laundering’ as a ‘legal problem.’ The central argument is that the cocaine trade in general, and the cocaine economy in particular, are a vital aspect of U.S. imperialism in the Colombian economic system. The paper tackles a critical problem: the place of cocaine in the re-colonization of Colombia – defined as ‘narcocolonialism’ – and the implications of the cocaine trade generally for U.S. imperialism in this context. The paper evaluates selected literature on the Colombian cocaine trade and offers an alternative framework underpinned by a political economy analysis drawn from Marx and Lenin showing that cocaine functions as an ‘imperial commodity’ – a commodity for which there exists a lucrative market and profit-making opportunity. It is also a means of capital accumulation by what could be termed, Colombia's comprador ‘narcobourgeoisie;’ dependent on U.S. imperialism. It is hoped that by analyzing cocaine with a Marxist interpretation and political economy approach, then future developments in understanding drugs in Colombia's complex political economy may be anticipated.