Prohibition and Drugs: Cracking Down on Illicit Drugs Means They Surface in Another Form The Economist
go to original May 22, 2014

Before “Breaking Bad”, there was “Miami Vice”. The 1980s television show pitted detectives in white linen suits against drugs traffickers who used the Caribbean as their point of entry into Florida. The route, at least, is back in fashion. The proportion of cocaine imports entering the United States via the islands is rising (see article), as clampdowns in Central America and Mexico push drugs gangs back to their old haunts.

The revival in Caribbean drugs traffic is just the latest example of the “balloon effect”, in which squashing down on illicit activity in one place causes it to pop up somewhere else. Colombia’s war on drugs in the 1990s and 2000s is another: coca crops moved back to Bolivia and Peru, now the world’s biggest grower; cocaine-processing shifted next door, to Ecuador and Venezuela; Mexico’s drugs gangs grabbed market share. A subsequent bloody clampdown on Mexican gangs diverted traffickers to Central America: Honduras became the region’s largest entry point for airborne smugglers. With the shift back to the Caribbean, the trade has come full circle.

The balloon effect also operates among consumers. Cocaine and heroin usage is dropping in places like the United States and Britain, partly because of educational campaigns, partly because of falling levels of purity (cocaine in Europe, for example, is often adulterated with a cattle-worming drug). But consumption of synthetic drugs like methamphetamine, ketamine and mephedrone is rising to compensate, in both developing and developed countries. Seizures of methamphetamines have tripled in Asia in the past five years. New ways of getting high proliferate faster than the authorities can keep tabs on. A report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says that 348 new psychoactive substances have been reported to the agency, most of them since 2008 (see article).

Read the rest at The Economist

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