by Matteo Tacconi
Having been a pillar of Turkish economy for decades, cultivation first and then the trafficking of opiates have been fought harshly lately by authorities. Yet, Turkey still remains a must-through country for Afghan heroin headed to Europe.
Over the past five years, the amount of heroin seized in Turkey has increased continuously. The statistics conveyed in the 2010 report on drug-related crime issued by the Turkish International Academy against Drugs and organised crime (Tadoc) in Ankara, the structure of excellence established in 2000 on the basis of an agreement between the Turkish police and UNODC, reveal that 6.6 tons were seized in 2005, 7.3 tons in 2006, 9 in 2007, 10.3 in 2008 and 12.2 in 2009.
A great deal of heroin is seized in Turkey. But the amount circulating is far greater. This primarily depends on the fact that the opium industry in Afghanistan is still a booming business. Since 2001, the year that marked the opening of hostilities in Kabul, a patent escalation in production was recorded that went hand in hand with the other escalation, the military one. Estimates show that currently Afghanistan produces 6 thousand tons of raw opium, a figure that represents 93% of the global production.
Turkey becomes essential then in the journey of «brown sugar» to the heart of the old continent. Just look at the globe: Anatolia lies right there, between Afghanistan and the Balkans. It has just stood there for centuries, playing the crossroads between Asia and Europe, the transmission belt of goods moving between the two continents. All goods. Heroin included, which is a good, indeed, to all intents and purposes.
«Anyway, even drugs,» considers George Recchioni, liaison officer at the Central Directorate for Anti-Drug Services (DCSA) in service at the Italian Embassy in Ankara «follow the same trade routes and rules of Economy. There is supply and there is demand, there is a buyer and a seller, and there is a route». To these historical and commercial considerations, landforms are added. Actually, the Turkish territory is inaccessible, harsh, and hard to control, which makes it easiest for traffickers to cross the border passes, especially those with Iran, hatchway for large quantities of heroin coming from Afghanistan, crossing Turkey and starting again towards the Balkans, to end their trip in Europe.
The Turkish corridor, in conclusion, is still by far the most popular passage for heroin transferred from Kabul to the Communitarian market. Of course, their stock runs the risk of being seized; however, this risk is well-calculated, for unraveling the Turkish territory is undeniably impossible. Moreover, a source at the Tadoc reveals: «We can make seizures, but as long as the situation in Afghanistan remains the same, we will always be exposed. Drug trafficking can be hit hard, but it will never be defeated».
Long before Afghanistan
In any case, not everything depends on Afghanistan alone, and the Turkish Mafia is no newcomer in the heroin market. It has been playing a most enviable role for decades, long before the crowning of Afghanistan as a Power in the opium industry, and well before the Susurluk scandal, and along the times, regardless of the changes recorded in the sector, it always has.
At the beginning of the last century, Turkey was even in a leading position in the field of opium production. Most plantations were located in the province of Afyon, in the central-west region of the country. Oddly, but not unexpectedly, Afyon is the Turkish word for opium.
The export of opium was one of the main revenues of the Ottoman Empire, which held the monopoly in the sector. Even after the disastrous fall of the Sublime Port, as diplomatic parlance referred to the empire, following the First World War, and the subsequent birth of the republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the product continued to provide huge profits to the State, which carefully avoided applying the measures proposed in the ‘20s by the League of Nations on export, import and use of this drug. Its continuity, in fact, was ensured in the passage from the imperial to the republican period.
Opium was a gold mine to Ankara, but also to criminals, who bought the product directly from the farmers of Afyon, paying them better than the State, and without red tape, and above all in cash. The farmers, whose livelihoods depended almost exclusively on the poppy fields, found the proposal more than enticing. Then, they started to provide the State with the poorest quality opium, selling the better crops to the Mafia. The Mafia, settling with the farmers and acquiring the goods, began stocking Europe, selling it to the pharmaceuticals and the top private consumers, high society members of the old continent, who used to smoke or sniff opium, as also recalled in several literary works and films on the Belle Époque.
Quickly the volume of illegally exported opium equaled the stocks controlled by the State. More and more Turkish dealers headed en masse through the Balkans, towards Europe, mainly towards Paris, which then became the major opium warehouse in the West. As the story goes, the demand in the French capital was such that even the on-board personnel of the legendary Orient Express train linking Paris to Istanbul took the transport upon themselves.
The Turks also began to form alliances with Yugoslavian, Bulgarian, and Greek crime, transferring loads and partnering with them in the transport of the drug. A current case of history repeating itself: the alliance between Turkish and Bulgarian, Albanian, and Serb heroin dealers is as strong as steel. After World War II, when Paris lost its primacy as the opium hub and was replaced by Marseilles, the Turkish Mafia signed agreements with the undisputed bosses in the market, the Marseilles and Corsica Mafias, later expanding its scope beyond the Atlantic Ocean toward the Americas.
A considerable turning point was achieved in the 1960s, when the demand for heroin grew exponentially, marking the passage from the smoking era to the shot. Turkish organised crime, picking up the scent of a new big deal, set up in its territory several laboratories where opium was chemically treated and processed into heroin. Refineries sprang up in Marseilles, where the Turks, taking advantage of their links established with the groups operating in the French Riviera, made tons of money by selling their wares.
At the same time, the Sicilian Mafia also, until then playing a minor role in drug trafficking, installed hundreds of laboratories on the island, buying opium from Turkey and then redirecting it to Europe and the United States.
Meanwhile, since the early 1970s, Washington waged an all-out war against drug trafficking, concerned about the drugs’ impact on the health of Americans and the national economy. War in South America, in the coca field. War in Marseilles, Sicily and Turkey, on heroin. The French Riviera laboratories were dismantled, the Sicilians suffered some severe blows, and Washington urged Ankara with increasing insistence, demanding immediate resolution of the issue, on the grounds that 80% of heroin on the U.S. market was processed from Turkish opium.
Turkey balked for a long time. Firstly, because the authorities were aware of the delicate state of the country and that the proceeds from opium, reinvested in the legal channels, contributed to supporting the real economy, so, they tended to accept the underworld business. Moreover, since domestic consumption of heroin was near zero, and therefore, Turkey was virtually immune from the scourge of drugs, its ruling class stood firm in the belief that the problem, rather than at home, was to be found across the Atlantic and depended on the immorality and the decay of American society.
Finally, after having come too close to diplomatic rupture with Washington several times, and fearing that the drug trafficking issue could loosen its ties with the NATO Alliance, which had included Turkey in 1952, laying it open to attacks by its historical Russian enemy, Ankara yielded. It passed a law that led the state to reduce the crop area, compensating farmers, and through strict control, preventing organised crime from bypassing the State to carve out its own opium market share. The reform worked. It was the year 1975.
Since then, Turkey’s opium production has continued decreasing, to almost disappear. Today, there are very few plantations, still located in Afyon and the vicinity, cordoned by the military, and dedicated exclusively to medical-industrial production.
The Turkish Mafia, despite the great watershed of 1975 that actually ended Turkey’s role as the breadbasket of opium, continued to operate on the drug front. Luckily for them, shortly after the sudden stroke of the 1975 reform, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan emerged as the new opium paradise, with annual production slowly reaching, and then surpassing, the yield of the Golden Triangle. In the 1970s and the early 1980s, this Southeast Asia region overlapping the mountains of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar), developed the most flourishing heroin factory in the world.
The Turks seized the new opportunities on the fly, by importing opium from the Golden Crescent and sorting it to the West raw or processed, when the refining process took place in Anatolia. So, they recovered what they had lost during the Roaring Years of Southeast Asia, and with the 1975 big bang. The outbreak of the conflict between the Turkish army and the PKK, in 1984, just made their operations smoother. As proved by Susurluk.
And the rest is recent history. It tells us that in the meantime, the Golden Crescent is almost reduced to Afghanistan, and the Turkish traffickers, as usual and despite the efforts of the state, have plenty to do. Turkish journalist Cengiz Erdinç at the public network TRT is most expert in drugs and published the remarkable Overdose Turkiye on the great circus of heroin. He confirms to Narcomafie, who met him in Istanbul, that Turkey is still a land of great trades.
«During the last few years,» Erdinç says, «the police have been trumpeting their great success in fighting against traffickers, placing a strong emphasis on the high number of heroin seizures. Certainly, unlike in the past, there is a will to fight drug trafficking. But this, in my opinion, can also be used as an alibi to divert attention from the fact that a lot of heroin is still circulating in the country. At the same time, these seizures do not amaze me: it is natural that as opium production in Afghanistan grows, Turkish police operations will also increase».
From Gurbulak to Istanbul
From producer to consumer, via Turkey. The prosperous Afghan opium harvest, mainly concentrated in the southern provinces, especially Helmand, with more than 60% of production, is stored and sorted in the various laboratories that have recently popped up in the country, and processed into finished products.
Actually, during this decade, Afghanistan has gradually changed, as Rosario Aitala and Cristiano Congiu stated in Limes (issue 2/2010), in an article unambiguously titled: La droga ha vinto (Drug’s victory), from simple opium producer to efficient processor, thanks to the blossoming of hundreds of laboratories where raw opium is processed into heroin, then packed and shipped to Europe. Most recent figures indicate that 60% of heroin in the EU is directly produced in Afghanistan.
This is confirmed by data on seizures in Turkey of raw opium and morphine base (the precipitate obtained after the first stage of opium processing) coming in from Iran, and acetic anhydride (the compound that turns morphine base into heroin) leaving the country: 189 kilograms of the first, 18 of the second, 13 thousand liters of the third. This shows that Turkey has done away with the laboratories and that the production process is now concentrated in Afghanistan.
From here, heroin heads towards Iran. Part of the drug is directly absorbed into the Iranian market, where demand for brown sugar is quite high, as is the spread of AIDS, affecting 21 thousand people, according to the latest figures released by the Ministry of Health (although the actual number is said to be even higher), a social plague now also affecting domestic security. A small portion of the drug, sorted also in Turkmenistan, feeds the Central Asia route. The vast majority of the goods, however, move to Turkey.
The customs post of Gurbulak in the province of Agri, the first Turkish village after crossing the border, is the main passage used by traffickers as it lies on the AH1 highway, the huge thoroughfare linking the Far East to Turkey, and then, through the E80 highway, from Turkey to Bulgaria and to Europe.
The Gurbulak pass is crossed daily by thousands of vehicles, including about 20 thousand trucks, the vehicles used most in heroin transportation. This was confirmed by the latest Tadoc report showing how almost half of the drug seized in 2009 was moved by large convoys, hidden in the gasoline tanks or crammed into trailers and pulled into metal pipes.
With the persistent road traffic, it is almost impossible to intercept all loads of heroin. Sometimes, the Turkish police carry out amazing seizures, like those of June 23, and September 23, 2009, when they detained, respectively, a Bulgarian truck driver who was transporting 300 kilograms of liquid heroin, worth 23 million Euros, and an Iranian man crossing the border with 275 kg of “brown sugar” on his vehicle. However, it is almost prohibitive to carefully check all the trucks passing by. In the end, more goes through than is stopped.
Gurbulak and other crossing points located in the two provinces of Hakkari and Van, marking the Turkish-Iranian border together with Agri, are constantly and carefully monitored by the police. From there, heroin runs across the Turkish territory, up to the major market of Istanbul.
The former Constantinople, an immense metropolis located at the junction between Europe and Asia, historically a crossroads for goods and people, is the ideal stop over for Afghan heroin, the warehouse where the various amounts are first delivered and stored, then routed towards Europe. It travels by sea, towards the Ukrainian city of Odessa, crossing the Bosphorus and then sailing the Black Sea, or towards Greece, passing through the Dardanelles and then navigating the waters of the Aegean; by air, from Atatürk International Airport, connected with the main European airports, and not coincidentally the target, in recent years, of new programs aiming at fighting the drug trade. And most of all, by land.
Heroine is loaded on trucks in Istanbul, to head towards Edirne, the ancient Smyrna, perched on the very permeable borders with Bulgaria and Greece, at the gates of the Balkans. The Turkish corridor works, as usual.
From Istanbul to Europe
The transfer of large quantities of drugs within the Turkish territory, importing them from Afghanistan via Iran, storing and then sending them to the Balkan route, requires greatskills and tight alliances.
Skills are not lacking. Cengiz Erdinç explains that the active groups in the heroin market, «among which stand out those of Hakkari, the Kurdish ones, and those rooted in the Black Sea area,» can boast a perfect «machine.» «The Babas have access to very competent manpower. The load must be received, unpacked; there are carriers and sellers. If you want to start a trafficking business, you must rely on an organization with far-reaching tentacles. The risks are considerable, indeed, and professionalism helps reduce them. The more professional you are, the fewer controls you are caught in, the more staggering the profits. Indeed, heroin trade is very, very profitable. Just think, carrying a kilogram of heroin from the border with Iran to Istanbul gives the Baba a profit of 4,000€».
Not to mention, then, the money gained by funneling drugs to the Balkans and to the European market. Here, organization is also required. And we now go to the second point; alliances are also essential. Another field in which the Turks are experts. The Istanbul and Anatolia gangs have historical links with the Balkans groups. As early as the 1930s, according to a report by the League of Nations, the Turkish Mafias were believed to transfer part of the opium in their possession to the Balkan mafia, who then directed it to Western Europe. Today, it’s the same old story.
The Turks, largely relying also on the Ottoman legacy, which had long connected Turkey to the Balkans, established agreements and alliances with Serbian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Greek and Albanian crime, both from Kosovo and Albania, as stated in the latest report by the OCTA (organised crime Threat Assessment), promptly disseminated by Europol each year.
Data on the arrests of foreigners in Turkey in 2009 for heroin-trade-related crimes contributes to highlighting the special partnership with Balkans crime. The figures provided by the Tadoc show that the majority of the 4,140 people detained were Bulgarians and Albanians along with Iranians.
This is no coincidence, since the strongest alliances of the Turkish Mafia in the Balkans are with Bulgarians and Albanians. Actually, Bulgaria, with its sound criminal background, historically represents the entrance gate for Turkish heroine in the Balkan Peninsula.
As for the Albanian Mafia, first, we must consider that Kosovo is the Balkan country crossed by most of the heroin heading to the EU markets: at least 40% of the whole, according to some sources. The last of the States emerging from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia absorbed the role of drug warehouse and conveyor belt at the time of the conflict with Serbia, in the years 1998-1999, in one of those moments of deep instability during which Mafias are unleashed.
But its crime enthusiasm was confirmed in later years, and seemingly even now, having gained independence on February 17, 2008, at the end of a long transition phase characterized by institutional weaknesses, underlying tensions, sieve-like boundaries and the rise to leadership of those «gangsters in uniform» (as they were called by the former chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal for crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte) who, at the time of the war, led the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/Uçk) to victory in its two-faced form of war organization and crime machine.
Yet, the Albanian Mafia in Kosovo does not stand alone. In recent years, all the shqiptari criminal groups, no matter what you read on their passports, whether they are Kosovans, Albanians, Macedonians, Serbs or Montenegrins, have proven to be more reliable in handling and placing large quantities of drugs on the Community market, which they partially dominate, at present. The Turks could not fail to notice their attitude. The agreements in the field of drug trafficking are the result.
The Turkish drug lords, however, have additional axes and other alliances. It is always sound to keep more roads passable, especially when the Balkan route is increasingly controlled, due to the approaching maneuvers towards Brussels by the post-Yugoslav states, and the inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria in the EU in 2007. In this respect, the relations with two groups of smugglers “on the rise” stand out: the Georgians andUkrainians.
The first have recently benefited from the increasing demand on the domestic front (18 thousand heroin users, out of a total population of five million people) and from the importance acquired by the South Caucasus route, which involves the three nations in the region, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as a transit hub for heroin to be sent to Russia with its booming drug market. Entrusting loads and stocks to the Georgians puts big bucks in the pockets of Turkish heroin bosses.
Even the Ukrainians, like the Georgians, can count on increased domestic consumption of heroin and on strategic factors, having the advantage of a much larger consumer mass from a higher total population (about 50 million people). The huge number of people, at least 500k, affected by HIV affirms that heroin use has reached impressive levels. As for strategic factors, Ukraine, in the dynamics of diversifying traditional routes, is a crucial junction along the Black Sea axis between the post-Soviet space and the Eastern EU.
The city of Odessa and the capital Kiev, in particular, have become important places for storage and sale. Every now and then, some Turk is nabbed around there while attempting to transport heroin on vans or trucks – in 2006 it happened twice within a few weeks, with 238 kilograms of drugs seized in all – proving that Turkish and Ukrainians drug traffickers gang up together.
Agreements have been made with the Balkan, Georgian and Ukrainian Mafias, and even with the ‘Ndrangheta, the Southern Italian criminal organization. This year’s map of ‘ndrinas in Calabria (the cells of the ‘Ndrangheta), drawn up by Reggio Calabria’s Carabinieri police in January, reveals that the Aquino, Papalia, Paviglianiti and D’Agostino families have their men in Turkey, appointed to manage relations with heroin Babas.
Agreements with the Balkan, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Calabrian Mafia, and beyond. Anatolian and Istanbul drug traffickers’ secret to success also lies in the large communities of their compatriots within the Community, hired as drug importers and dealers.
Turks are particularly numerous in Germany, where they represent the largest ethnic minority group in the country, and 3.5% of the overall population. But they play certain role also in the United Kingdom and France (500 thousand people), in the Netherlands(400 thousand, and, as in Germany, the largest minority), Belgium (200 thousand) andAustria (200 thousand).
The first big wave of Turkish immigrants in Europe was recorded in the 1960s, when Anatolian population growth and persistent unemployment prompted them to seek their fortune abroad, where an economic boom strengthened labor demands. At the beginning, the German, British, French, and other governments engaged workers through seasonal contracts, granting temporary residence permits. Both governments and migrants expected their stay would be short. Not at all. Many Turks chose to remain abroad, where economic conditions were better.
Several companies renewed their employment contracts and the relevant governments encouraged the settlement of Turkish communities with policies of family reunification. Then, residence permits became permanent and the naturalization process began (at the moment, more than a third of Turks in Germany also have German citizenship).
How could organised crime ignore such dynamics? It would be impossible not to envisage the creation of a vast network of dealers across Western Europe, and indeed they did. This made it easier and easier to ensure that the loads of heroin were taken to their destination, placed, and sold.
It is still easy, today. «The link between the Turkish groups in Istanbul and Anatolia and the Diaspora is one of the strengths of the drug trafficking system and the Mafia in general,» assures Cengiz Erdinç.
The Europol and German, British and Dutch Police services agree, and constantly reiterate that Turks residing within the borders of their countries often represent the «terminals» of criminal oligarchies in the motherland. For example, the United Kingdom Threat Assessment of 2009-2010, drawn up by the SOCA (Serious organised crime Agency), a British agency devoted to fighting crime, states that «Turkish traffickers continue to dominate the European and UK heroin market.
The main groups are embedded in the southeast of the country, where heroin enters the Turkish territory, or in Istanbul. Many men are deployed along the heroin route, in the Balkans and in the principal EU countries, especially Holland and the United Kingdom, to facilitate transport and transactions».
What next?
Let’s go back to the starting point: Seizures. Data confirm that the Kom (Kaçakçılık ve Organize Suçlarla Mücadele Daire Başkanlığı), the Turkish police branch committed in the fight against trafficking and organised crime, did a great job. Letizia Paoli, professor of criminology at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven and co-author of The World Heroin Market: Can Supply Be Cut? published in 2009 by Oxford University Press, claims that this shows that «by virtue of formal negotiations with the EU, Ankara has begun to demonstrate a more vigorous approach in combating trafficking.»
Giorgio Recchioni also maintains the U-turn idea. «The Turkish police,» he says, «have made massive efforts. In Turkey alone, twelve tons of heroin were seized last year. Ankara’s commitment is producing its outcome, although the smugglers have started to make more frequent use of alternative routes than before, especially that of the Black Sea.» Another point scored by Turkey: the Tadoc. «The international academy is a center of excellence, a structure for training agents from all over the world. It is the flagship of the Turkish police and of the multilateral system of cooperation in the fight against Mafias,» Recchioni declares.
But even excluding these truths, something still smells fishy. Tangible progress would appear enough to warily say that drug trafficking cast a smaller shadow than in the past. The commitment by the police and the state in fighting against heroin traders appears the only thing to focus on. Yet, it’s clear that the flow of heroin is still significant and the Turkish lords of drug continue to handle a large share of the European market for “brown sugar”.
Thus, the question is, why isn’t this business on the agenda in Turkey? Why only emphasize positive data? Many factors come into play. The first has to do with domestic consumption, virtually non-existent. The Turks abusing heroin can be counted on one hand, and the events occurring at the time of the diplomatic duel with the United States in the mid-70s are reflected even now. The current ruling class tends to believe that rather than a Turkish problem, drug trafficking is an issue that concerns the Western countries demanding heroin.
These considerations on the limited scope of the domestic market are bound to others, of moral and religious nature. Turkey is a Muslim nation and Islam has always been perceived as a “breakwater” to the spread of drugs. In the words of Letizia Paoli, «Although in recent times, the high-class population began to make widespread use of cocaine and synthetic drugs, heroin still raises much aversion. It also depends on religion, and more specifically on the fact that the practice of shots is seen as a violation, a form of rape of one’s own body». According to Islamic principles, the body must keep its sacredness pure, because it is the absolute property of God and must be returned untouched to God after death. Human beings, it can be argued, are only its temporary guardians.
In addition to this, there is the firm belief, now more marked than ever, given that the nation is ruled by the Justice and Development Party, that Islam as a whole, with its traditional social and family solidarity, can hinder the distribution of hard drugs.
Moreover, the state curtails the heroin issue on further grounds: the Kurdish issue. Again we can recognize a correspondence between past and present. Fifteen years ago, before the outbreak of the Susurluk Affair, and the emergence of the perverse links between Mafia, police, army and institutions, the Kurds were labeled as the hegemonic force in trafficking. The political elite argued that their domestic PKK enemies held the monopoly on opium import and refining, and on the export of finished products to European markets. The trading proceeds were allocated by the PKK, as generally maintained in Ankara, to the purchase of weapons and ammunition useful to opposing the Turkish army.
However, the scholar Philip Robins wrote in an essay published in The Middle East Journal in 2008 (and titled Back from the Brink: Turkey’s Ambivalent Approaches to the Hard Drugs Issue), «the organization’s involvement in narcotics trafficking appeared to be minor, in any case, limited to ’assessing taxes‘ on those really implicated, rather than in the primary activities of production, refining and distribution.» In other words, the Turkish state, mired in the narcotics business from head to toe, passed the buck onto the Kurds to shake any possible suspicion from itself. Until November 3, 1996, a Mercedes carrying a cop, a mobster, and a politician crashed in an Anatolian village.
The Kurds are still heavily branded. The war between Ankara and the PKK has again reached its peak, and the strategic think-tanks linking the government and the military establishment, which, it is said, are now conducting their war against the Kurdish separatists without the help of the Mafia, crank out publications highlighting the role of Kurdish militias in the heroin market. As in the good old days, it is generally argued that it is precisely the trafficking proceeds that allow the separatists to build up their powerful arsenal. This argument certainly holds some truth.
As confirmed by European Public Prosecutors, the UNODC and Europol, it is true that Kurdish military actions, these days more than ever, have a significant background in criminal operations, where smuggling of drugs, persons and protection money star in the script. But it is also true that another substantial portion of the PKK’s funding comes straight from private donations by supporters and partisans, and by the activity of the Kurdish migrants abroad.
Therefore, it seems that even now, as used to happen in the 1990s, we tend to tar everyone with the same brush. We usually forget that drug-trafficking not only involves Kurds, but also Turks, and that, moreover, the two groups cooperate happily without any of the ethnic friction that has always marked the relations between the majority and largest minorities in the country (not that they agree on other issues, indeed).
«When it comes to business, Kurdish criminals and Turkish traffickers get along swimmingly,» says Cengiz Erdinç, also demonstrating that even Turkey confirms the usual convergence of Mafia oligarchies of different ethnic origins, representing one of the pillars of organised crime in multi-ethnic countries, along all the borders of the world, and in general within each state hit by the Mafias.
Last, there is one final reason to justify the inappropriate lack of attention to drug trafficking in Turkey. For once, a reason coming from outside. Afghanistan, with its raging war and millions and millions of poppies, exclusively attracts the concern and resources of the Western Powers in the fight against drugs, first, Washington and London. This has led, quoting the work of Philip Robins, again «to the decrease of international focus on transit countries.»
Large seizures? Sure. Is the state less involved in the trades than in the past? Of course. Still, the flow of heroin in Turkey remains significant.
Source: flarenetwork.org