The Illicit Medicines Trade from Within: An Analysis of the Demand and Supply Sides of the Illicit Market for Lifestyle Medicines
In recent decades all sorts of illicit medicines have been increasingly
traded world-wide: from antibiotics to weight loss drugs, and
antimalarial tablets to steroids. The illicit medicines market is
generally associated with considerable health risks for its users, as
well as with high revenues and a perceived growing degree of criminal
organization. It is therefore important to gain extensive criminological
insights into this global market. This book provides in-depth and
empirically-grounded theoretical insights into the online and offline
trade in illicit pharmaceuticals, with particular reference to lifestyle
pharmaceuticals. Trade in the Netherlands and manufacturing in China
are taken as extended case studies. The author primarily focuses on the
activities, dynamics and structure of the illicit market in the
Netherlands, and on the production and transnational distribution of
illicit medicines in and from China. By means of interviews with actors
directly involved in the trade, analysis of court cases, a survey study,
and an online analysis, this book provides thorough and rich insights
into the actors, dynamics, and social organization of the flourishing
illicit medicines market. This title is part of the Pompe series,
publications that combine legal and social-scientific approaches to the
problems of criminal law, written by staff members of the Willem Pompe
Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology in Utrecht and by authors who
share the Institute's school of thought. Dissertation. (Series: Willem
Pompe Institute, Vol. 89) [Subject: Criminology] 
