Drug trafficking can include the sale, large-scale purchase, cultivation, manufacture, processing, and transportation of illegal, addictive, and sometimes mind-altering drugs. Drug trafficking is often thought of more specifically as the illegal transportation of narcotics for profit, often from one country to another, but also within a country. It is highly profitable, in part, because governments prohibit or heavily regulate drugs. This makes them more difficult to acquire (reduces supply), thus increasing price and profits for drug traffickers. Drug trafficking is risky because law enforcement hunts for traffickers and their wares and enforces stiff penalties on those it catches, and this serves to further increase drug trafficking profitability. Organized crime groups often carry out drug trafficking. Those that make a bulk of their profits from it are referred to as drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). Drug trafficking is relevant to the study of criminal psychology because it is a major and highly profitable criminal activity in which criminals with various psychological motivations engage. This article delves into the motivations for drug trafficking, trafficking methods, the role of organized crime in drug trafficking, and government strategies to combat it.
International Drug Trafficking
The United Nations has three treaties with international support that lock nations into an international drug prohibition regime. The chief United Nations body addressing drug trafficking is the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.
Drug trafficking has expanded with globalization. To give a sense of the size and scope of drug trafficking, the 2011 United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime report Estimating Illicit Financial Flows from Drug Trafficking and Other Organized Crime estimated that, in 2009, drug and transnational organized crime activities amounted to more than $870 billion or about 1.5% of total world gross domestic product. The report further specified that drugs accounted for 17–25% of all crime proceeds, half of all organized crime proceeds, and 0.6–0.9% of world gross domestic product. According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Americans spent approximately US$100 billion annually on cocaine, meth, heroin, and cannabis between 2000 and 2010.
Types of Drugs
The World Drug Report is United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime’s annual report. The 2016 report identifies various drug types, including opioids, amphetamine-type substances, cocaine, cannabis (marijuana), and new psychoactive substances. New psychoactive substances include synthetically produced drugs (sometimes called designer drugs) that may be so new that they are not technically prohibited until law enforcement can detect them and work within legal frameworks to prohibit them.
Drug Smuggling Versus Trafficking
The term drug smuggling is often used interchangeably with drug trafficking. George Diaz argues in his book Border Contraband that a drug smuggler is one who smuggles prohibited goods (specifically, petty amounts for personal consumption) and a drug trafficker is one who smuggles professionally and at commercial scale. Other legal definitions describe drug smuggling as avoiding paying state tariffs, customs duties, and taxes, while trafficking is the more expansive term relating to any activity involving prohibited drugs. Again, the terms are often used interchangeably.
Common Terms for DTOs
The most common term for an organization that traffics drugs is cartel, although it is widely considered by scholars to be inaccurate and deceptive. As Michael Kenney describes in his book From Pablo to Osama, government agencies and the media have an incentive to portray drug networks as large, threatening, hierarchical organizations, all of which the term cartel connotes. This, however, is not necessarily the reality nor is it technically accurate. Cartel is an economics term that means a number of firms that, when working together, can control the price of a commodity through the control of the supply. Drug cartels have always had competition among each other and have never been able to achieve this control over supply. Nor are they, as Kenney points out, as hierarchical as one may think. He argues that drug networks often organize themselves as flat networks that are more nimble and adaptable than traditional hierarchal bureaucracies.
Scholars use many terms for actors that traffic drugs. These include DTOs, transnational criminal organizations, drug networks, clandestine transnational actors, and organized crime groups, among many others. Street gangs, prison gangs, maras (large Central American gangs), mafias, and organized crime also traffic drugs.
Drug trafficking tends to be a violent business because there is no court system to resolve disputes. This makes organized crime groups that maintain a reputation for violence particularly well suited to the business. Corruption is an explanation for the resilience of drug traffickers. In Mexico, traffickers are famous for their Plata o Plomo strategy (“take my silver or take my lead”), which artfully describes the combination of violence and corruption used to coopt the highest levels of government.
Motivations for Drug Trafficking
Most drug traffickers and DTOs are rationally motivated by profit and act in accordance. This makes economists particularly adept at the study of drug trafficking.
Although the profit motivation appears simple and obvious, the reality is often more complex. For example, in economically unequal societies such as Mexico, many young people see drug trafficking as the only viable path to upward social mobility. For example, some young men in the Mexican state of Sinaloa (where drug trafficking has been entrenched in the culture since the 19th century as documented by Mexican scholars such as Lusi Astorga and journalist Anabel Hernandez) see drug trafficking as the only way to be respected and get young women to pay attention to them.
Some in this same society would avoid drug trafficking but are forcibly recruited under duress by organized crime groups. Some are tricked into trafficking unwittingly as blind mules. A mule is a drug courier often carrying smaller quantities of drugs on their body past customs agents for profit. A blind mule is a person who unwittingly traffics drugs (e.g., a smuggler places drugs in a person’s bag at the airport and steals the luggage upon arrival in another location having already passed through security).
Some become drug traffickers because of the lifestyle. The Narco-Juniors of the 1990s in Tijuana were children of Tijuana’s wealthy and middle class who became enamored with the fast life. Their dual citizenship allowed them to cross freely between the United States and Mexico with loads of cocaine and low penalties if caught with limited amounts. They glorified films such as Godfather and became traffickers not out of economic necessity but to live this lifestyle.
Narco Cultura
Narco cultura has become a catchall term for the cultures that have emerged around drug trafficking in Mexico and Latin America. These subcultures have many features, such as the worshipping of narco-saints such as Jesús Malverde, a possibly fictional Mexican Robin Hood bandit killed by the government for smuggling and theft, and the Santa Muerte or Saint Death. In Mexico, there are narcocorridos or drug ballads that glorify the exploits of drug traffickers. Drug traffickers who fund the construction of legitimate churches; provide cash payouts to supporters; and build roads, schools, and public works in their bases of support sustain narco cultura economically. Narco cultura reinforces the legitimacy of criminal activity in the minds of the people who participate and benefit from it, thus decreasing the ability of authorities to stop it.
Narco-Terrorism
Narco-terrorism is an ambiguous term coined by Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry in 1983 that can refer to either the use of drug profits to support terror operations or the use of terrorism to promote drug trafficking. Insurgent actors use drug trafficking instrumentally for profit. Insurgent or terrorist actors are politically motivated and seek to overthrow or change the policy of an existing government, per the Central Intelligence Agency’s definition. These groups traffic drugs to fund their terror operations, such as bombings.
There are numerous examples of insurgent groups using drug trafficking to fund their political revolutionary agendas. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC for its initials in Spanish, used profits from drug trafficking to fund its insurgent operations, which included bombings in the capital city Bogota in the early 2000s. According to Washington Post reporting, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has proven in court that Hezbollah, the Shiite terror group based in southern Lebanon, used cigarette diversion/tax evasion in the United States to fund its operations.
The Juarez Cartel of Mexico used car bombings to intimidate government officials and rivals to protect its drug business in Mexico in 2010. Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin cartel (Colombia), used car bombings, kidnappings of politician’s family members, assassinations of government officials and police, among other tactics, to protect his drug business in the early 1990s.
Trafficking Techniques
Whatever their motivations, drug traffickers have developed ingenious techniques to traffic drugs around law enforcement. These techniques include, but are not limited to, hidden compartments in vehicles, body couriers, or mules swallowing packets of drugs; hiding drugs inside cans of chili peppers; using fake travel documents, trebuchets, and catapults to launch drugs across borders; sea semi-submersibles (submarines); corrupting law enforcement agents to allow drugs to pass; unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, planes, gofast boats; and more.
Fighting Drug Trafficking: Supply-Side
Policy makers and scholars conceptualize two approaches to the fight against drug trafficking: the supply-side approach and the demand-side approach. The supply-side approach focuses on targeting the supply of drugs on the logic that reduced supply will lead to decreased availability, increased price, and therefore, decreased overall use. Examples of the supply-side approach include crop eradication either by hand or by aerial spraying of herbicides. Aerial spraying has been heavily criticized in places such as Colombia because people who live near eradication sites are exposed to harsh chemicals. The primary problem with aerial spraying is that drug traffickers and drug markets are highly adaptable, and when crops are sprayed in one place, more fields simply appear in another.
Another aspect of supply-side policies is interdiction. Law enforcement can target drugs at various stages of processing or en route to consumer markets. Another form of interdiction is bulk cash interdiction. In the context of Mexican drug traffickers supplying the U.S. consumer market, drugs go north but the profits must go south often in the form of bulk cash, where police can intercept it.
Similar to interdiction, law enforcement can also target the organizations and kingpins (drug trafficking leaders) that traffic drugs in hopes of disrupting these markets. One common criticism of the kingpin strategy in Mexico has been that when a leader is removed, his subordinates fight for control of the organization, resulting in increased violence for the DTO and society. The lead U.S. antidrug agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Consolidated Priority Organization Target program, emphasized this form of interdiction in the United States and abroad. The supply-side approach has predominated the discussion from the 1970s (President Richard Nixon famously declared war on drugs in 1971) until the 2000s and in many ways continues through the 2010s.
Demand-Side Approach and Harm Reduction
Scholars have long argued for the demand-side approach, but this has only gained traction recently. Many studies have demonstrated the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of strategies that attempt to reduce the demand for drugs. Such strategies include drug prevention education (to prevent young people from using drugs) and treatment for drug users.
A related, but slightly different, approach is harm reduction. Harm reduction approaches attempt to mitigate the social costs of drug trafficking and use. For example, needle-exchange programs allow drug users to exchange dirty needles for clean needles, thus reducing the spread of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.
Alternative Policies
One way to combat drug trafficking is to consider alternatives to prohibition, such as legalization and regulation, medicalization, and decriminalization of drugs. Changing policy on marijuana in various U.S. states is a case in point. In 2012, Colorado and Washington were the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. Many others have established medical marijuana systems. These strategies, which allow legal actors to produce marijuana, have generally cut into drug traffickers’ marijuana profits. Many states have also decriminalized small amounts of marijuana to varying degrees. Internationally, Uruguay has legalized marijuana, and the sitting and former presidents of Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, and Mexico have expressed interest in alternative drug policies.
References:
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Websites
- Drug Enforcement Administration. Retrieved from https://www.dea.gov/
- Drug Policy Alliance. Retrieved from https://drugpolicy.org/
- InSight Crime. Retrieved from https://insightcrime.org/
- RAND Drug Policy Research Center. Retrieved from https://www.rand.org/well-being/justice-policy/centers/dprc.html
- Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy Drug Policy Program. Retrieved from https://www.bakerinstitute.org/program/drug-policy
- State Department: Bureau of Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL). Retrieved from https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/under-secretary-for-civilian-security-democracy-and-human-rights/bureau-of-international-narcotics-and-law-enforcement-affairs/
- United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. Retrieved from https://www.unodc.org/