Drug Trafficking

Drug traffickers are typically depicted in Hollywood movies as larger-than-life people whose elaborate schemes move enormous amounts of drugs across international borders. Despite, and sometimes because of, governmental interventions, these kinds of drug traffickers do exist, but from a law enforcement perspective, drug trafficking can refer to almost any act that facilitates the distribution of an illegal substance, from the biggest drug cartels to the smallest “mule” to the lowliest street-level seller.

Our knowledge about upper-level traffickers has been largely confined to first-person accounts written by retired traffickers and descriptions provided by law enforcement agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/) or the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (http://www.unodc.org). Because of the difficulty of gaining access to upper-level drug traffickers, there has been little academic research on this topic that does not rely upon “official” data sources. There has been, however, a considerable amount of original research on drug trafficking at the lower end of the chain of distribution.

The crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with its accompanying increase in crime, spurred the government and a generation of social scientists to better understand the economics of illegal drugs, particularly trafficking/distribution and the operation of drug markets. Much of the early work in the field was descriptive in nature and involved minimal analysis. For research to be useful, however, many researchers realized that it was not enough to simply describe drug traffickers; it was necessary to identify distinct types of traffickers, explain the structural and functional differences between them, and understand how they change over time. Following the lead of prominent economists who had written about the underground sector of the economy, and illegal markets in particular, drug researchers began to develop more rigorous approaches to examining drug traffickers and distributors. Two broad areas of inquiry were developed (typically, with input from and funding by law enforcement agencies): research that examined the social organization of traffickers/distributors, and research that examined the technical organization of trafficking/distribution.

Social organization, in this context, refers to issues of cooperation, differential responsibility, and power and authority among traffickers/distributors.[Page 157] By comparing and contrasting the growing volume of studies that described drug traffickers and their operations, some researchers have postulated that social organization among drug traffickers reflects a continuum of organizational complexity. At the simplest level are those traffickers who work as independent operators, or freelancers—people who have no obligations at either end of the chain of distribution. The risks and rewards of the business are entirely their own, but because they operate alone, their operations tend to be small and comparatively inconsequential vis-à-vis the overall market for illegal drugs. Freelance distributors typically dominate drug markets that are formed whenever a new product is introduced and a solid consumer base has not yet formed.

At the other end of the trafficking spectrum are large, corporate-style organizations that sometimes employ hundreds or thousands of people to perform a wide variety of jobs, and that operate on many of the same principles as corporations in the legal economy. Corporate-style organizations often feature sharp divisions between ownership, management, and labor over their competing interests, especially around the issues of wages and working conditions, and this has been the source of much of the violence associated with this style of distribution. Competition between rival organizations has also generated a great deal of violence, and it is this feature of drug trafficking that has sparked such interest on the part of government and researchers.

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