A slum, as defined by the United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the proportion of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the developing world between 1990 and 2005. However, due to rising population, the number of slum dwellers is rising. One billion people worldwide live in slums and the figure will likely grow to 2 billion by 2030.

The term has traditionally referred to housing areas that were once relatively affluent but which deteriorated as the original dwellers moved on to newer and better parts of the city, but has come to include the vast informal settlements found in cities in the developing world.

Recent years have seen a dramatic growth in the number of slums as urban populations have increased in the Third World.

In April 2005, the director of UN-HABITAT stated that the global community was falling short of the Millennium Development Goals which targeted significant improvements for slum dwellers and an additional 50 million people have been added to the slums of the world in the past two years. According to a 2006 UN-HABITAT report, 327 million people live in slums in Commonwealth countries - almost one in six Commonwealth citizens. In a quarter of Commonwealth countries (11 African, 2 Asian and 1 Pacific), more than two out of three urban dwellers live in slums and many of these countries are urbanising rapidly.

The slums have high rates of crime, suicide, drug abuse and disease. The drug problem occurs in the entire American continent. Countries such as Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, for example, suffer from drug trafficking and criminal gangs who use the slums as their headquarters. As in many of these slums do not enter the police, organized crime can freely settle and build their headquarters or barracks generals literally, so there are deposits of heavy weaponry, including drug factories.

If the rich and developed countries, e.g.United States and Canada got together and created a fund where he could deposit funds to be used in the removal of slums and building houses and neighborhoods that were actually integrated into society the benefits would be wonderful . End slums in Latin America would solve much of the problem of drug trafficking.

No use to think that is an isolated problem and that does not reach us. Who ever heard of Colombian and Mexican cartels, most responsible for drug distribution throughout the Americas? The United States is very coveted by drug traffickers, who see here a large consumer market. Canada and Europe are also on the traffickers as a major consumer market.

Drug trafficking is a venture capitalist of the most efficient and fully adapted to the reality of the American continent. It is a company that concentrates income, highly profitable, which uses cheap labor. And the social effect of this is terrible. There is nothing revolutionary or transformative in traffic. Besides having these capitalist features, it is absolutely overwhelming and settles in the slums by building a policy of terror, where poor young people kill, steal and sell drugs to fuel organized crime.