Brasilia, 9 May 2022 – From 9-10 May, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Brazil held, through the Centre of Excellence for Illicit Drug Supply Reduction (CoE), a workshop of the Pilot Project to Monitor the Illicit Drug Market in the State of Pernambuco, in partnership with the Secretariat of Social Defense Pernambuco.
The initiative was formulated by the CoE, which was created in an innovative partnership between the National Secretariat for Drug Policy and Asset Management of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security (SENAD/MJSP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Brazil and UNODC. This event, which began in early April in the state of Paraná and continued in the state of São Paulo on May 5 and 6, is now being held in Pernambuco and aims to present the Pilot Project for Monitoring the Illicit Drug Market in Brazil.
The objective of this Pilot Project is to to develop methodologies to strengthen the understanding of the drug market in Brazil based on price indexes and other variables, in order to encourage policies to reduce the supply of narcotics and offer subsidies to Brazilian law enforcement authorities to address international drug trafficking.
The event also had the partnership of the UNODC Integrated System for Monitoring Illicit Crops (SIMCI) in Colombia, which had previously published the bulletin entitled "Monitoring the Prices of Illicit Drugs: Lessons learned in Colombia and possible challenges in Brazil". The bulletin introduced the issue of drug price monitoring from a technical perspective through documented international experiences and lessons learned in Colombia.
Access the full bulletin at this link.
By holding the workshops in the States of Mato Grosso, Paraná, Pernambuco and São Paulo, the project aims to contribute to the improvement of the monitoring of the dynamics of the illicit drugs market, in order to facilitate the support of strategies aimed to impact and interrupt the illicit production chain and drug trafficking, and to expand the project to other States.
About SIMCI
SIMCI is a technical project that, in addition to monitoring the cultivation of illicit drugs for two decades, promotes studies in related areas, having developed a methodology to estimate the price of illicit drugs in different regions of Colombia. Since 1999, through the use of satellites and field verification, the project has calculated the extent of the areas of illicit coca cultivation and the potential for cocaine hydrochloride production in the country, building historical data that support annual reports on the subject.
In addition, SIMCI promotes thematic studies on the cultivation of marijuana and poppies, on the chemical substances used in the production of drugs and on the illicit extraction of minerals. The project's research model, with a geographic focus, is based on the gathering and analysis of primary information, fieldwork and the design of indicators to obtain data.
