ABSTRACT
Post-Communist states offer extremely attractive possibilities for drug trafficking and for laundering of drug money. The principal Western hard drugs—heroin, cocaine, crack, and LSD—seldom are available in post-Communist countries. Organized drug crime in a sense has arrived in post-Communist states. Poland's amphetamine industry constitutes the most sophisticated indigenous narcotics enterprise in the post-Communist countries. The region has received miserly antinarcotics assistance, and Washing-ton—mired in an expensive and unproductive cocaine war in the Andes— views drugs in post-Communist societies as exotic and essentially tangential to US interests. Abuse of nonalcoholic drugs long has plagued Eastern Europe and the former USSR, although discussion of the subject officially was discouraged until late in the Communist era. Confronting increasingly out-of-control drug traffic, police and public health officials everywhere from Warsaw to Bishkek desperately crave large infusions of antidrug assistance from Western nations, especially the United States.
