By Vanda Felbab-Brown

This paper explores policy options for responding to the supply of heroin and synthetic opioids from Mexico to the United States. Forced eradication of opium poppy has been the dominant response to illicit crop cultivation in Mexico for decades. Forced eradication appears to deliver fast results in suppressing poppy cultivation, but the suppression is not sustainable even in the short term. Farmers find a variety of ways to adapt and replant after eradication. Moreover, eradication undermines public safety and rule of law efforts in Mexico, both of high interest to the United States….Unless security and rule of law in Mexico significantly improve, the licensing of opium poppy in Mexico for medical purposes is unlikely to reduce the supply of heroin to the United States. Mexico faces multiple feasibility obstacles for getting international approval for licensing its poppy cultivation for medical purposes, including, currently, the inability to prevent opium diversion to illegal supply and lack of existing demand for its medical opioids. In seeking to establish such demand, Mexico should avoid setting off its own version of medical opioid addiction.

Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution,2020. 28p.

By Cassie Dummett and Arthur Blundell

While subsistence agriculture and logging still contribute to deforestation, commercial-scale agricultural expansion is now recognized as by far the single largest driver of deforestation worldwide and thus also of greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change.

Several initiatives have quantified how much and where deforestation is driven by commercial agriculture, and even how much of this deforestation was driven by international trade. However, fewer analyses have been able to determine the extent to which agricultural commodities are being grown on lands that have been illegally cleared of forests. This study therefore focuses on illegal deforestation driven by agricultural expansion, and places it within the scope and scale of all tropical deforestation.

This report revisits Forest Trends’ 2014 report, by reassessing the extent of illegal agro-conversion across the tropics from 2013 to 2019, and finds a similar story: more forest land is being illegally cleared to make way for agricultural crops and pastures than ever before.

Washington, DC:Forest Trends, 2021. 81p.

By Hernando Zuleta González

The increase in the area cultivated with coca in Colombia has cast doubt on the country’s anti-drug strategy and has encouraged skepticism about the possibility of a complete and definitive peace. Furthermore, this perception of failure has given rise to policy proposals based on the idea that illicit crops are a criminal issue, not a development one. This paper is a complete review of the available evidence and aims at organizing the information related to this debate and shedding light on the convenience or inconvenience of certain policies. There are six highly relevant facts: (i) With respect to reducing cocaine supply, the efforts in seizures and destruction of infrastructure are more efficient than the efforts in eradication. (ii) Seizures and destruction of infrastructure may help in reducing coca plantations. (iii) There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that the consumption of cocaine in Colombia has increased. (iv) Most regions of the country have seen a decrease in the amount of coca crops. However, at least one armed group is present in the regions where the cultivated area has increased. (v) Coca growing municipalities are, on average, poorer than the rest of the country. These municipalities have a low tax revenue, and reduced levels of connectivity and institutional development. (vi) The increase in the consumption of cocaine in the United States is concentrated in a specific age group and in certain states. This fact makes it difficult to relate the increase in consumption to an exogenous increase in the supply.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2019. 40p.

By Philip Keefer, Norman V. Loayza, and Rodrigo R. Soares

This paper reviews the unintended consequences of the war on drugs, particularly for developing countries, and weighs them against the evidence regarding the efficacy of prohibition to curb drug use and trade. It reviews the available evidence and presents new results that indicate that prohibition has limited effects on drug prevalence and prices, most likely indicating a combination of inelastic drug demand (due to its addictive properties) and elastic supply responses (due to black markets). This should turn the focus to the unintended consequences of drug prohibition. First, the large demand for drugs, particularly in developed countries, generates the possibility of massive profits to potential drug providers. This leads to the formation of organized crime groups, which use violence and corruption as their means of survival and expansion and which, in severe cases, challenge the state and seriously compromise public stability and safety. Second, prohibition and its derived illegal market impose greater costs on farmers than on drug traffickers. In many instances, this entails the transfer of wealth from poor peasants to rich (and ruthless) traders. Third, criminalization can exacerbate the net health effects of drug use. These consequences are so pernicious that they call for a fundamental review of drug policy around the world.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 36p.

By Peter Reuter

The production of cocaine and heroin, the two most important drugs economically, has been concentrated in a small number of poor nations for 25 years. A slightly larger number of developing nations have been affected by large-scale trafficking in these two drugs. This paper reviews what is known about drug control programs and considers non-traditional options. The usual array of programs for suppressing drug problems, enforcement, treatment, harm reduction and prevention have been assessed almost exclusively in wealthy nations. Although treatment has been shown to be cost-effective, it is of minimal relevance for reducing the drug problems of nations such as Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico or Tajikistan, which are primarily harmed by production and trafficking rather than consumption. Efforts to reduce drug production and trafficking have not been subject to systematic evaluation but the best interpretation of the available evidence is that they have had minimal effect on the quantities produced or trafficked. It is reasonable to conclude that international drug control efforts can do more to affect where these drugs are produced rather than the quantity. If that is the case, and given that spreading a specific level of production or trafficking to more rather than fewer nations probably decreases global welfare, it may be appropriate to consider a less aggressive stance to current producers and to make strategic decisions about the location of an industry producing a global bad.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 38p.

By Daniel Mejia and Carlos Esteban Posada

The main purpose of this paper is to summarize the information currently available on cocaine production and trafficking. The paper starts by describing the available data on cocaine production and trade, the collection methodologies (if available) used by different sources, the main biases in the data, and the accuracy of different data sources. Next, it states some of the key empirical questions and hypotheses regarding cocaine production and trade and takes a first look at how well the data match these hypotheses. The paper states some of the main puzzles in the cocaine market and studies some of the possible explanations. These puzzles and empirical questions should guide future research on the key determinants of illicit drug production and trafficking. Finally, the paper studies the different policies that producer countries have adopted to fight against cocaine production and the role consumer countries play in the implementation of anti-drug policies.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 62p.

By Daniel Mejía and Pascual Restrepo

This paper provides a thorough economic evaluation of the anti-drug policies implemented in Colombia between 2000 and 2006 under the so-called Plan Colombia. The paper develops a game theory model of the war against illegal drugs in producer countries. We explicitly model illegal drug markets, which allows us to account for the feedback effects between policies and market outcomes that are potentially important when evaluating large scale policy interventions such as Plan Colombia. We use available data for the war on cocaine production and trafficking as well as outcomes from the cocaine markets to calibrate the parameters of the model. Using the results from the calibration we estimate important measures of the costs, effectiveness, and efficiency of the war on drugs in Colombia. Finally we carry out simulations in order to assess the impact of increases in the U.S. budget allocated to Plan Colombia, and find that a three-fold increase in the U.S. budget allocated to the war on drugs in Colombia would decrease the amount of cocaine that successfully reaches consumer countries by about 17%.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes–Facultad de Economía–CEDE, 2008. 60p.

By International Crisis Group

Coca stands at the heart of a fierce debate over Colombia’s worsening rural insecurity. The plant’s leaves are the sole raw material from which cocaine, an illegal drug that generates outlandish profits and finances armed and criminal groups, can be manufactured. Colombian President Iván Duque argues that the whole narcotic supply chain – from coca cultivation to global cocaine trafficking – is the scourge behind rising massacres, forced displacement and assassinations of community leaders in Colombia. With cultivation hitting new highs in recent years, Bogotá has vastly expanded campaigns that involve sending in the army and police to pull up or otherwise eradicate coca crops. It also threatens to restart aerial fumigation. Yet an approach based on forceful eradication of coca, which the U.S. has stoutly backed, tends to worsen rural violence, while failing to reduce drug supply. A new strategy is needed that persuades coca farmers to abandon a plant that offers a stable income and an attractive alternative to other legal crops.

Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2021. 44p.

By Lucia Bird and A. Gomes

The widespread devastation of Guinea-Bissau’s forests – a process coordinated by the military – was curtailed in April 2015 by the imposition of a five-year moratorium on logging exports. Now, the current government looks set to lift the ban – raising widespread concerns of a resurgence in illicit logging.

Drivers for lifting the moratorium may be linked to the powerful interests at play in the sector, both within Guinea-Bissau’s elite and those of the Chinese business community, which have long-standing links to the logging business in the country. These interests, and particularly those of Prime Minister Nuno Gomes Nabiam, were highlighted by a significant seizure of illicit logs by the Judicial Police in November 2020.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2021, 17p.

By Daniel Mejía

No one can deny that Colombia has worked tirelessly to fight illegal drug production, trafficking, and organized crime groups linked to these activities. Since 1994, more than two million hectares of coca have been sprayed with glyphosate, 1,890 metric tons of cocaine have been seized, and 28,344 coca leaf processing laboratories have been destroyed. The costs that Colombia has paid in this “war” are very high. Since 2000, the country—with partial funding from the U.S. government—has invested more than US$1.2 billion, or about 1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), per year into the military component of Plan Colombia.1 However, the costs have not solely been public financial resources. More than 57,000 Colombians are estimated to have been killed between 1994 and 2008 as a consequence of growing illegal drug markets and resulting confrontations between drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) and the Colombian government during the war on drugs.2 This translates into approximately 3,800 additional homicides (or about 25 percent of total homicides) per year from drug-related violence alone. Yet despite such enormous investments and costs, Colombia continues to be a key producer and trafficker of illicit drugs, and in particular of cocaine.

Washington DC: Brookings Institute, 2016. 17p.

By Mendel, William W. and Munger, Murl D.

The primary purpose of this publication is to show how the principles and techniques of strategic and operational planning can be applied to the supply reduction side of our national effort to curb the trafficking of illicit drugs. An earlier version was published in 1991 which introduced campaign planning methodology as a means to help bridge the gap existing between the policy and strategy documents of higher echelons and the tactical plans developed at the field level. These campaign planning principles, formats, and examples of operational level techniques have been retained and updated for use as models for current interagency actions. This expanded edition provides a more detailed overview of the drug problem in the opening chapter and adds a new chapter devoted to strategy--what are the key ingredients and how is an effective strategy formulated? The United States is at a critical juncture in its campaign to eliminate the rampant drug problem. Past gains are in danger of being lost. Recent trends suggest a resurgence in illicit drug use and that younger and younger Americans are falling prey to the drug pusher.

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 1997. 186p.

By David E. Brown.

International criminal networks mainly from Latin America and Africa—some with links to terrorism—are turning West Africa into a key global hub for the distribution, wholesaling, and production of illicit drugs. These groups represent an existential threat to democratic governance of already fragile states in the subregion because they are using narco-corruption to stage coups d’état, hijack elections, and co-opt or buy political power. Besides a spike in drug-related crime, narcotics trafficking is also fraying West Africa’s traditional social fabric and creating a public health crisis, with hundreds of thousands of new drug addicts. While the inflow of drug money may seem economically beneficial to West Africa in the short-term, investors will be less inclined to do business in the long-term if the subregion is unstable. On net, drug trafficking and other illicit trade represent the most serious challenge to human security in the region since resource conflicts rocked several West African countries in the early 1990s. International aid to West Africa’s “war on drugs” is only in an initial stage; progress will be have to be measured in decades or even generations, not years and also unfold in parallel with creating alternative sustainable livelihoods and addressing the longer-term challenges of human insecurity, poverty, and underdevelopment.

Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2013. 104p.