Michael Cameron – Waikato University Economics Dept – wrote an interesting piece on his blog about Economics and the war on drugs. He refers to an article by Tom Wainwright in the Wall Street Journal on “How economists would wage the war on drugs”. Essentially, the war on drugs is being lost. Badly. As Wainwright notes:

The number of people using cannabis and cocaine has risen by half since 1998, while the number taking heroin and other opiates has tripled. Illegal drugs are now a $300 billion world-wide business, and the diplomats of the U.N. aren’t any closer to finding a way to stamp them out.

This failure has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed. The cartels that run the narcotics business are monstrous, but they face the same dilemmas as ordinary firms-and have the same weaknesses.

El Salvador – a leader of one of the country’s two gangs has a human resource issue with high turnover of employees.

Mexico – the Zetas cartel franchises its brand like McDonalds which in turn has led to arguments over territory.

Rich countries – street corner dealers are struggle to compete on price and quality with the ‘dark web’. It is a similar scenario with Amazon.

To combat the drug trade governments have focussed on restricting the supply. Each year acres of coca plants and manufacturing activities are destroyed but the price has remains around $150-$200 per pure gram for the past 20 years. How have the cartels managed to keep this price?

However, supply of drugs might not even be appreciably reduced when drug crops are targeted. Wainwright points out that:

Drug cartels are a monopsony – they are a single buyer of Andean coca leaves, so they have market power over the price of leaves (i.e. the cartels have the ability to strongly influence the market price of coca leaves). So if some crops are wiped out, the price is unlikely to rise because of the cartels’ market power. The price of cocaine is so much higher than the crop input costs that even a large increase in crop prices would have little effect on the market price of cocaine (i.e. even a big increase in the price of coca leaves would lead to only a small shift in the supply curve for cocaine).

Also because of its addictive nature demand for drugs is relatively inelastic – the decrease in quantity demanded is less than the percentage increase in price. Therefore reduced supply and a higher price doesn’t change demand that much.

Demand-Side interventions seem to be a better option and they are also a lot cheaper. Weighing up reducing supply by destroying coca crops in remote areas against drug education in schools and you find the latter is a much more plausible option.

A dollar spent on drug education in U.S. schools cuts cocaine consumption by twice as much as spending that dollar on reducing supply in South America

Bigger loses have be inflicted on cartels with some US states making marijuana legal.

Tom Wainwright also has written about this in his new book “Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel”