Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht

Modelling the World Heroin Market

Assessing the Consequences of Changes in Afghanistan Production

The project is an international collaborative effort of the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corporation in the United States and the MPI. Its main aim is to improve understanding of the determinants of heroin production, prices and flows and to assess the consequences of interventions in Afghanistan or close to production drawing from the cutback in opium production engendered by the Islamist Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001. The project was funded by the European Commission, the Netherlands Ministry of Justice, the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a U.S. private foundation. It involved primary data collection in six Asian countries (China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Thailand), Turkey and Colombia. The study is now in its final stages and the three principal investigators expect to send the final book manuscript to the publisher in early 2006.