Douglas Farah, a former investigative journalist who now studies crime and terrorism at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a research institution in Alexandria, Va., testified that criminal organizations and terrorists "use the same pipelines, the same illicit structures and exploit the same state weaknesses".
At a basic level, opportunity is present in all crimes and facilitated by illicit opportunity structures and exploited by weaknesses in social control.
Because of the frequent application of meconium for illicit drug screening, structured screening protocols have also been developed for this non-invasively collected matrix [ 98, 99].
With this caveat in mind, two themes dominate our efforts to map the structure of illicit drug trafficking.
It has been shown that, in order to understand the structure of illicit drugs market, the spatial component should be taken into account.
Notably, the nascent stage of SNA research in crime science hampered our attempt to synthesize what we know about the organizational structure of illicit drug trade.
Examining SNA research of drug trafficking organizations, this systematic review of 34 published studies, describing 55 trade networks, is the first to synthesize what we currently know about the structure of illicit drug trade.
Other variables entered: Age, race, tobacco use, illicit drug use, family structure, parental monitoring, peer pressure, pubertal onset and self-esteem.
Spatial analysis provides a method for delineating the complex nature of the associations between multiple levels of social structure and illicit drug use [ 13, 14].
The goal of this study was to develop an expert system capable to identify the potential biological activity of new substances having a molecular structure similar to illicit amphetamines.
