2

Drug Trafficking

The nature and extent of the harm

Drug trafficking is considered to be the largest revenue generator
globally among the variety of transnational criminal markets (Reuter
2014), and despite the huge criminal justice infrastructure aimed at
reducing drug trafficking, the problem is getting worse. The number
of people using drugs worldwide was estimated by the World Drug
Report to be 30 per cent higher in 2019 than it was 10 years earlier,
in 2009 (UNODC 2019). Globally, 11 million people injected drugs
in 2017, while 271 million people were estimated to have used illegal
drugs in that year, which is 5.5 per cent of the global population aged
between 15 and 64. The harm caused by drug misuse is a continuing
global crisis. In the US alone, 47,000 opioid overdose deaths were
recorded in 2017, up 13 per cent from 2016. More drugs are being
illegally produced than ever before (for cocaine in 2017 a 25 per cent
increase on 2016, at 1,976 tons), and more are being seized. Synthetic
drugs are a growing part of the problem, with synthetic opioids such
as fentanyl finding a market in North America and tramadol in West,
Central and North Africa (UNODC 2019).
The picture, as we shall see, is one of a catastrophic failure of law
and policy to control this global criminal market. The criminal justice
supply-chain intervention approach has not reduced illicit drug
consumption despite sometimes very large seizures. At the demand
end, government initiatives targeted at treatment and prevention are
not reaching enough users, with the 2019 World Drug Report finding
that globally only around one in seven people with drug disorders
received treatment. The figure is considerably less than this in prisons
where clandestine but widespread illicit drug use takes place, usually
without access to standard harm-reduction measures such as needle
exchange programmes or substitution therapy, giving prisoners an
elevated risk of contracting serious diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C
(UNODC 2019). Drug policies are a source of racial injustice,
such as the much-debated difference in sentencing dispositions for
crack versus powder cocaine, the first more likely to be found in
the possession of black offenders, the second in the hands of whites.

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Crack attracts significantly higher penalties purportedly because of

the nature of the drug, but the effect is indirect racial discrimination.
Racial discrimination is in fact evident throughout the criminal justice
response to drug offences, such as in stop and search, arrest decisions,
prosecution decisions and sentencing (Glasser 2000; Eastwood et al
2013; Shiner et al 2018). These, to be clear, are harmful effects caused
or exacerbated by the legal response to drug trafficking and use.
In 2012, UNODC reported that one in every one hundred adult
deaths in the 15–64 age group was due to drug use (UNODC 2012),
and in 2017 they identified that globally, but excluding sub-Saharan
Africa, injecting drug users accounted for nearly one-third of new
HIV infections (UNODC 2017b). Drug production and trafficking
in producer and transit countries are security and development issues,
adversely affecting millions with violence and disrupting state capacity
to function effectively. In the richer, consumer, countries the end
points of the drug trafficking chain of supply create serious public
health issues (Middleton et al 2016; Christie 2019; Hurley 2019; Csete
et al 2016) as well as harms associated with the functioning of the
trade such as violence and knock-on crime events where users turn
to robbery or burglary to fund addiction (Bennett et al 2008; Jacques
et al 2016; Werb et al 2011).

The structure of drug trafficking: source, transit, market

Analysts tend to split drug trafficking into layers. The ‘high’ or ‘upper
level’ of drug trafficking includes organizing production, refining and
exporting in producer countries and arranging their transport to and
import into consumer destinations. In those consumer countries, the
regional wholesale distribution of drugs is the activity of the middle-
market or mid-level trade, and at the bottom of the chain of supply
is the retail trade, so-called lower level distribution (Natarajan 2011).
Just as in legitimate trade circles, wholesalers sell to other members of
the trade, while retailers sell to consumers, usually in smaller amounts
than the larger sales made by wholesalers.
The literature on drug trafficking is huge, and spans disciplines.
Perspectives on this trade can be found in politics, international
relations, economics and anthropology, as well as in sociology and
criminology. Much of the criminological research has been focused
on the lower levels of the global trade, for various reasons. The street-
level retail markets have been more visible to researchers, the public
and politicians in consumer nations than are the more distant upper
echelons of the trade, appearing as day-to-day problems in their

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neighbourhoods. Criminology in the US has grown up to meet the

challenges of such neighbourhood crime problems, especially from the
1960s Chicago School era onwards with its emphasis on understanding
the causes of delinquency. So we have less research in criminology
about the upper levels of the international drug trade (Desroches 2007)
and here we need to draw more on the research in some of the other
disciplines mentioned.
The mechanics of drug trafficking vary depending on the type
of drug in question. The production locations for both heroin and
cocaine are few: six countries account for 98 per cent of the world
heroin production, with Myanmar and Afghanistan leading the way,
having produced more than 80 per cent of the world’s opium since
the mid-1980s, while the world’s coca production is based in Bolivia,
Colombia and Peru (Reuter 2014). The long trafficking chains these
drugs move through as they transit from producer to consumer
countries may look like an unduly cumbersome way to do business,
but moving production closer to consumption brings a considerable
escalation in the law enforcement risk, whereas the situation in
producer countries is far more conducive to uninterrupted production
with minimal risk. This may involve state and police negligence,
corruption or collusion, or in some regions the effective capture and
replacement of the local governance infrastructure with drug business
interests: so-called ‘narco-states’ (Paoli et al 2009). Participation in
the markets for heroin and cocaine takes an hourglass shape overall
(Reuter 2014), with large numbers of farmers growing the crops, large
numbers of street-level retailers in consumer countries and relatively
fewer traffickers connecting these two ends of the market. For cocaine
and heroin, Reuter estimates that the producers (that is, the growers)
get around 1 per cent of the revenues, while 70 to 80 per cent of the
revenues are ‘generated by the last two or three transactions, as the
drug goes from ounce purchases by low-level wholesalers to a fraction
of a gram at the retail level’ (Reuter 2014: 364). Although the bulk of
the revenues goes to these low-level dealers, the large number of these
retail deals and dealers means that ‘the fortunes are made by those at
the top of the trade’ (Reuter 2014: 365).
While cannabis is mostly produced within the consumer nations,
there is a cross-border trade in it, exported mainly from Jamaica,
Colombia and Mexico, and in Europe from Morocco and Albania
(Reuter 2014; Natarajan 2019a). Likewise, synthetic drugs are
produced both in consumer countries and abroad, with various
producer locations depending on which consumer country is at issue:
for example, in the case of methamphetamine Mexico produces some

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of the US’s supply, although domestic production in the US is on

the rise, and other production and consumption locations span the
world from Western and Central Europe to recent manufacturing
increases in North Africa (Natarajan 2019a). The East and Southeast
Asia and Oceania region is currently grappling with significant flows of
methamphetamine being produced in Myanmar and the surrounding
Greater Mekong region, especially the so-called ‘golden triangle’ of
Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. Ecstasy is produced in many European
countries, particularly Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as
‘Australia, North America, South Africa, China, and Southeast Asian
countries (where they are much cheaper to produce than in Europe),
and more recently in South and Central America’ (Natarajan 2019a: 7).
Several of the producer countries are characterized by a drug
trafficking culture that is violent and cartelized. Colombian drug
production was dominated through the 1980s by the Cali and Medellín
cartels, which were ultimately diminished in their powerful grip on
the trade in the early 1990s after pressing their political ambitions too
far when the Medellín assassination of a presidential candidate led the
state to initiate a military crackdown. Since then, smaller and more
numerous ‘cartelitos’ have developed, although less stable, less political
and part of a generally more fragmented scene. In Mexico, for decades
a small number of large cartels have fought for a share in controlling
the drug trade, with seven identified in 2010 (Astorga and Shirk 2010),
and the result has been such an extraordinary level of violence that
Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso in Texas, is now the
world’s most dangerous city.
Drug traffickers are either organizers – so-called ‘king pins’ and their
middle managers who control the business – or mules/couriers (Dorn
et al 2005). Mules run the greater risk: border seizures of illicit drugs
are common. Street dealers run considerable risk too, being visible
and engaged with end consumers who may not have much incentive
to maintain the secrecy of the supply chain. Notwithstanding the
fairly well-known large cartel structures, particularly in Colombia
and Mexico, and the documented participation of mafias and other
organized crime groups in such a lucrative market (Natarajan et al
2015), most research studies have generated a picture of the upper
level of the international drugs trade as represented by:

informal and loosely organised associations of relatively small

syndicates or crews of independent drug entrepreneurs.
They compete for market share and deal primarily or
exclusively with trusted associates chosen from ethnic,

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 Drug Trafficking

kinship, and friendship networks. Most dealers are highly

cautious, eschew the use of violence, typically make huge
profits, attempt to maintain a low profile, rationalise
their conduct as business activity, and operate within
geographically niche markets. (Desroches 2007)

Drug trafficking is necessarily clandestine, unlike some of the other

markets discussed in this book such as antiquities, wildlife or human
trafficking. In those markets the objects of trafficking themselves may
not need to be disguised or hidden in transit, one smuggling strategy
being simply to present the objects in transit as part of the legitimate
trade, using false documents or other misrepresentations. This approach
is not available to drug smugglers, and as such the structure of the
international traffic in drugs is shaped by the requirement to avoid
detection, with network security and minimizing risk being found
to be ‘key organising principles of drug trading organisations’ that
need to be considered as mitigating the view that drug trafficking is
an enterprise purely structured by rational efficiency considerations
(Benson and Decker 2010: 130). This has been put forward as one
of the main reasons for findings of drug trafficking networks being
constituted by smaller groups, not formally connected to each other
but more like a network of connected nodes without a vertical or
horizontal command structure. This arrangement, or more accurately
lack of arrangement, serves to protect each participant node in the
network from the law enforcement risk that would attach were the
structure more monolithic (Williams 1998a; Morselli et al 2007).
In such decentralized networks, power and status can be linked to
function, so particularly effective brokers who are able to serve as
‘network vectors’, linking separate parts of the trafficking chain, may
find themselves highly prized (Morselli 2001).
Methods of movement cover land, sea and air, including everything
from using the postal service to concealed compartments in vehicles,
bodily insertion, private jets, speedboats and submarines, fishing boats
and, most often, large commercial freight trucks and container ships.
Despite the significant attention to drug smuggling at the border
in consumer countries including the US and European countries,
the massive daily global movement of commercial shipments means
that without insider intelligence, container deliveries can still make
it through the security barrier in large numbers. Not only, then, do
the main drug trafficking methods follow the routines of transit in
legitimate global business, they are disguised by the volume of that
legal trade.

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In addition to conventional business trade routes, another observable

trend over recent decades has been an increase in leisure travel due to
the fall in price of aeroplane seats and other forms of transit. Several
studies of drug traffickers have picked up on the exploitation of this
trend in illicit trade. Holiday travellers are exploited to traffic illicit
drugs (Marsh et al 2012: 171–2), sometimes persuaded to do so with
the treat of a free holiday. Speed and regularity of transit connections
is a factor in this tactic. For example, as it has become common for
people to take day trips on the cross-channel ferry from the UK
to France, sometimes in a van to take advantage of duty-free prices
in Calais on wine and food, trafficking illicit goods alongside this
movement of people and legal goods has become easier to disguise
(Hornsby and Hobbs 2007).
As the global supply routes for illegal drugs develop in response to
regulatory pressures, traffickers take the opportunity to develop local
markets for their commodity along the way. So transit countries, which
neither produce nor, initially at least, consume the drugs, become
affected by the trade over time and develop as consumer markets in
their own right: this is why there has been ‘a surge in drug use among
the general population in Nigeria and other African countries as well
as in the Indian subcontinent’ (Natarajan 2019a: 8).
In the consumer countries, official agency reports have tended
to create the impression of a marketplace controlled by criminal
syndicates. To the contrary, ethnographic, interview and other
sociological studies have often struggled to find evidence of such
syndicates, coming instead to an impression of drug dealing markets
as comprised of ‘small groups of wheeler-dealers who operate
competitively and entrepreneurially’ (Adler 1993: 2). The several
findings of such an opportunistic entrepreneurial marketplace do not
rule out the presence of larger criminal organizations, and there is
clearly evidence that in certain times and places these do indeed enter
the trade (Fuentes 1998), but it is a general theme in the organized
crime research literature that smaller, fragmented entrepreneurial
groups and partnerships are more usual while the presence of mafia
is often wrongfully imputed (Reuter and Haaga 1989). Two studies
of the UK market for imported drugs involving Dick Hobbs, several
years apart, found a situation similar to the earlier studies of Adler
and Reuter in the US: networks of dealers working as sole traders or
in small groups (Pearson and Hobbs 2001, 2003; Matrix Knowledge
Group 2007). The impression we have from Hobbs is of the importing
end of drug trafficking, as well as other branches of organized crime,
as a market where flexible systems of enterprise flourish, while the

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larger centres of gravity of bigger and more stable organizations cannot

adapt to avoid law enforcement intervention or the changing social
and economic contexts of late modern capitalism (Hobbs 2001, 2013).
Similar findings can be found in other studies, confirming the picture
of drug trafficking as generally more like a ‘cottage industry’ than a
‘concentrated industry’ (Eck and Gersh 2000): populated, that is, not
by a few highly organized groups that control supply but by a large
number of smaller groups and individuals where the groups may have
fluid membership, no long-term established leaders and no access to
sophisticated technology beyond common items such as cell phones.
Many commentators have noted the parallels between the organization
of illegal drug trafficking and how successful contemporary legal
business structures itself to take maximum advantage of globalization
opportunities. For example, Shelley, summarizing Thoumi’s 2003
study of the Andes region (Peru, Colombia and Bolivia), suggests
that Colombian groups have based their success:

on many of the same principles found in the globalization

of large legitimate corporations. They run network-based
business, not top-down hierarchical structures. They
integrate their business across continents. Drug cultivation
and processing are done at low-cost production sites in
Latin America, their products are marketed to the lucrative
Western European and American markets, and the profits
are laundered at home, in offshore locales such as Panama,
and in international financial centres. (Shelley 2019: 226)

Aside from the publicity surrounding the South American cartels,

one of the contributing reasons to the general impression that drug
trafficking is the remit of large criminal organizations is the over-
representation of ethnic minorities in drug trafficking in the US
and the UK and the unreflective assumption that goes along with
this observation that these are surely part of larger, ethnically based
mafias. Yet there are good reasons for this over-representation, and
we do not need to reach into underground alien conspiracy theories
to find them (Woodiwiss and Hobbs 2009; Hobbs and Antonopoulos
2013). As ever, we need only to look to the evidence provided by
social structure and the normal routines of market forces. Ethnic
minorities are restricted in opportunities to enter the legitimate
labour market, discriminated against and therefore more likely
to suffer economic strain (Merton 1968) and look for alternative
ways to make money (Decker and Townsend Chapman 2008:

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 Transnational Criminology

97–8). They may be part of a diaspora and have links to source

countries, which makes participation in transnational networks of
illegal trade easier and more resistant to law enforcement attention,
disguising communications about crime among more routine global
conversations among families and friends. Such family and friendship
bonds may be stronger than the ties between unrelated professional
criminals and therefore more likely to provide the basis of a resilient
structure of criminal enterprise (Paoli and Reuter 2008). One can
see how some of these arguments could be pulled into the orbit
of an alien conspiracy version of transnational organized crime,
but equally from the perspective of how to think about the costs,
risks and benefits of setting up a transnational business that trades
commodities, these considerations seem fairly mundane as producers
of certain overall demographic patterns in those markets. That is
to say, of course certain people are more willing, or better socially
equipped, to become participants in drug trafficking networks than
others, but these aggregate ethic differences are the result of the
opportunity structure the particular forms of enterprise present.

Regulation and control of drug trafficking

Social scientists have come to see enforcement and control as more
instrumental in positively shaping the markets they apply to than
might at first seem to be the case if we think of criminal justice as
simply a series of prohibitions. The usual starting assumption would
be that regulation is a response to criminal behaviour and simply
seeks to eliminate it. Yet a pattern emerges where criminal behaviour,
not amenable to being entirely suppressed, adapts to regulatory
interventions, interfaces with them, and the outcome is an amalgam
of the original phenomenon and the official response. Reuter explains
how this can look, in describing the dominance of large criminal drug
trafficking groups in Tajikistan:

The progress in border control and law enforcement that

Tajikistan has achieved since the late 1990s – thanks to
the support of international agencies and foreign donors –
has facilitated the large groups’ domination. By 2001, for
example, a total of 12 to 13 police and customs posts could
be found on the route from Khorog to Osh, a distance of
only 700 to 800 kilometers. The roads from the Afghanistan
border to Dushanbe are checked even more strictly. Rather
than create insuperable barriers to drug transportation, this

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 Drug Trafficking

has generated large payments to border and police officials.

(Reuter 2014: 367)

In such examples, large criminal operations can minimize law

enforcement risk by buying it out, so the law enforcement structure
can serve to embed the power of mafias and cartels rather than disrupt
them. In other cases, however, the threat of serious law enforcement
intervention which cannot be fully neutralized through corruption
exerts a pressure on high-level traffickers to insulate themselves from
investigation. This is accomplished by minimizing the number of people
they deal with in the supply chain and layering the overall operation
into severable parts to make such insulation possible through delegating
colleagues lower down the chain to have more exposure to risk. Drug
mules will have little knowledge of the overall drug trafficking network,
a sensible precaution by the organizers in case the carrier is intercepted.
Law enforcement affects the geographical routes of drug trafficking
too, seemingly pushing routes around the globe depending on where
the policing resource is allocated from time to time (Andreas 2000).
The usual metaphor is pushing a balloon: one side is pushed in,
the other pops out in equal measure. Perhaps a better metaphor for
transnational criminal markets is an electric current, seeking out the
path of least resistance, always ready to divert in response to increasing
friction in any particular route.
In all of these various ways, ‘criminalisation steers the flow of events
within the market in distinctive ways’ (Seddon 2019: 10), and the
relationship between illegal drug markets and regulation has been
argued to be constitutive, in the sense that Shearing has identified
(Shearing 1993). He sees markets, legal and illegal, as a ‘regulatory
accomplishment’ (1993: 72): regulation shapes the opportunity
structure of markets ex ante and then the market and the regulation
evolve in a process of mutual observation and co-production (Seddon
2019). From this perspective, the war on drugs should be seen as a
slow waltz of market and regulation, where sometimes one partner
leads, sometimes the other.
The global policy and law enforcement attention to drug trafficking
internationally is massive. The United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC) spearheads a large group of intergovernmental
organizations which address the issue, alongside others: Interpol, Europol,
the World Customs Organization (WCO), the UN International Drug
Control Programme and more. Most consumer nations have dedicated
police drug enforcement squads and dedicated legislation prohibiting
use, possession and supply. There is no shortage of legal prohibition and

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the supporting enforcement apparatus in consumer countries, but the

situation in producer and transit countries is much less conducive to
energetic control and that is a context which will surely not change
soon. Drug trafficking is often held up as an example of the failure of
prohibition strategies which, as was the case with alcohol in the US in
the 1920s and ’30s, target the supply of an illicit commodity without
doing enough to decrease the demand for it. This is slightly misleading
though because while the predominant international supply-
intervention strategy has certainly not stemmed the flow of illegal
drugs, there is a considerable demand-end response too organized
internally by national governments, including a mix of policing,
education and awareness raising, and drug rehabilitation for users. All
of these interventions can be criticized, but rather than labelling the
war on drugs only a failure of supply-side prohibition, it would be
more accurate to say that there are many features of global criminal
markets that make these hugely profitable enterprises hard to control.
The decades since 1950 have seen two trends in particular in relation
to drug trafficking (Seddon 2019: 4, his emphasis):

First, a trend of rising drug consumption and the geographical

spread of the drug trade into parts of the world that had previously
avoided it, starting with Eastern Europe (Csémy et al 2002),
moving across parts of Asia and, most recently, into Africa
(Carrier and Klantschnig 2012; Dewing et al 2006), leading
to today’s globalized drug market (UNODC 2012: 69).
Second, at the same time, a hardening of the international
prohibition regime (Bayer and Ghodse 1999) … The fact
that these have been parallel developments – the tighter
the screw is turned, the worse the problem gets [is the]
‘paradox of prohibition’. (Marks 1990)

The trends in illegal drug use globally of increasing production,

increasing numbers of users, and decreasing prices, during the decades
when the war on drugs has been ostensibly aiming for complete
prohibition, show that law enforcement does not have the capacity
to reduce, let alone eliminate the market – although it may have
reduced the velocity and extent of these trends compared to the
alternative of having no enforcement (MacCoun and Reuter 2011;
Pollack and Reuter 2014). There is almost universal agreement in
the literature that supply-focused intervention strategies have failed,
and many analysts have seen this failure as placed within a context of
globalization of communication, transport and trade that has for some

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time been supplying an opportunity context in which illicit global

trade can grow. Where these globalizing trends have far outpaced the
capacities of nation states to exert control over the innovations of free
market entrepreneurs, legal and illegal, contraband goods will cross
state borders as sand runs through fingers.
When sand runs through your fingers, though, the instinctual reflex
is to tighten your grip. This has been the bind that the war on drugs
has created: a public which accepts that the war is not working but is
reluctant to give up on it despite regular interventions from experts
pleading with governments to look for ‘options beyond eradication,
interdiction, criminalization, and incarceration to limit the social
consequences of drugs’ (Naim 2009: 168). One result of this constant
pressure to reform is that, looking around the world, we can see that
there is an increasing move towards decriminalization (that is, not
applying criminal penalties) and legalization (that is, doing away with
criminal drug laws altogether) for some drugs (Eastwood et al 2016).
These moves are often presented initially as social policy experiments,
with the implication that things can go back to the way they were if the
new deregulatory ethos does not work out. The dilution of drug law
prohibitions has been most notable in relation to ‘softer’ recreational
drugs like cannabis and is justified on a variety of inter-related grounds,
including that the harm caused by recreational use is not significant
or at least is contested, criminal justice intervention is harmful and
inequitable, and illegal use has been so widespread for so long, and
for some drugs in some social groups and contexts has for a long time
been quite normalized, that it is clear the old approach to attempted
control has failed. The movement from illegal to legal cannabis
production, dealing and use in some jurisdictions surely shows the
value of the spectrum of enterprise analytical approach. The somewhat
arbitrary, or at least contingent, application of the criminal law to
some drugs, like cannabis, but not others, like alcohol or tobacco,
is the main operative distinction between conventional and criminal
enterprise here. Moving that line of il/legality on the spectrum of
enterprise changes the opportunity structure for the market, but the
underlying dynamics of supply and demand remain similar. Cannabis
is now becoming ‘big business’ in some of the legalized jurisdictions
(Richter and Levy 2014): big legitimate business.

Drug trafficking as illicit business

As we have seen, Desroches in his literature review on upper-level
drug dealers (2007) finds that they ‘rationalize’ their conduct as

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business activity. Rationalize here is his word: I would go further and

say that to most intents and purposes it is business activity. Desroches
notes (2007: 830):

A number of studies of higher level smugglers and

wholesalers note that the language used by traffickers
is the language of business, dealers view themselves as
entrepreneurs, and that being a good ‘businessman’ is the
ultimate compliment in the drug trade. (Adler 1985; Adler
and Adler 1992; Desroches 2005; Hagan and McCarthy
1998; Reuter and Haaga 1989; Zaitch 2002)

Certainly there are constraints on the way the business can be carried
out, imposed by the illegality of the market. However, some of these
constraints do not distinguish these markets from some legal trades.
For example, illegal businesses cannot publicly advertise, while also
remaining hidden from law enforcement. But the legal cigarette trade
cannot publicly advertise in some countries either. Illegal businesses
cannot borrow money from banks unless under false pretences, through
intermediaries like front companies, or else they have to seek finance
from an alternative, underground, finance system. Yet in reality they
do both: the recent growth of money laundering laws globally has
developed precisely to try to identify the criminal money that washes
through conventional financial systems. Even the impossibility of
recourse to law which is much remarked upon in the literature is over-
blown. Organized crime has to settle its own contractual disputes, it is
said, as it can hardly turn up in court to ask for an official determination.
To a significant extent this is of course true but sophisticated operators
in many of the trafficking markets we study in this book do use the
law to protect their enterprises, purporting to be legal traders when
in fact they are not. So without denying the well-founded observation
that illegal business is in some respects different from legal business,
the difference seems almost entirely to be in the social and political
response to the trade, in other words in the simple fact of its being
labelled as illegal, and the economic prerogatives for the business that
follow on from that. And even these economic prerogatives are not so
clear-cut in practice as they are sometimes imagined to be.
As such, in a world context in which ‘globalization has greatly
increased the volume of containerized trade, the frequency of
international flights, the availability of international delivery services,
and global access to the internet’ (Natarajan 2019a: 7), it is hardly
surprising to find these methods exploited by illegal entrepreneurs for

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the acceleration of the transnational illicit trade in drugs. Researchers

in recent years have noted the illegal drug trade making use of the
‘darknet’ to organize sales, with Silk Road having been a notorious
example (Bilton 2017). The darknet is probably quite obscure as a
concept to many non-users but the drug trade has also benefitted
from the development and growth in general use of many less arcane
or sinister technologies (Marsh et al 2012). Drug deals are done in
internet chat rooms and closed Facebook groups. Cell phones are used
to make arrangements: either ‘burners’ where pay-as-you-go SIM
cards are purchased for single use then destroyed or ‘cloned’ phones
which ape the identities of legitimate customers. Money laundering
is facilitated by the normalization of electronic transfers, in which
the task for the specialist forensic accountant policing staff becomes
identifying patterns of suspicious behaviour among the millions
of financial transfers occurring daily. File encryption allows illegal
entrepreneurs to hide evidence of their trade just as it protects the
data of legitimate actors.
The structure of drug trafficking overall represents a series of
responses to business decisions that affect all traders – for example
availability of product, conducive political context for doing business,
access to a suitable workforce – combined with a series of responses
to the need to minimize the risk of detection by law enforcement
or threats from rivals, like dealing with trusted collaborators (Decker
and Townsend Chapman 2008), and projecting an impression of
violent resolve while minimizing the use of actual violence which
would be detrimental to business (Reuter 2009). Just like conventional
business, the drug market has successfully developed new products and
diversified its supply chains through moving into new regions and
using new technologies, all of which has increased its customer base
globally. Just as with the globalization of legal business, this has been
achieved in aggregate through the enterprising profit-focused decisions
of individual entrepreneurs and their networks, groups and firms. In
this way the micro-sociological relationship between individual choice
and opportunity produces a global structure of illicit economy.
It is axiomatic that drug trafficking is driven by demand, and this is
often put forward as a reason supply-focused intervention strategies fail.
Illegal entrepreneurs will always work to find a way to meet consumer
demand where that exists. However, this is a rather simplistic view of
the relationship between supply and demand and on closer inspection it
seems that relationship is more dynamic than might usually be thought:
it is not just one-way. The development of new synthetic drugs, for
example, may be considered an ongoing attempt by drug traffickers to

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 Transnational Criminology

test the waters of demand, and sometimes the new product may not
fulfil expectations. We can perhaps see this in the New Psychoactive
Substances (NPS) part of the UN’s tracking of world drug trafficking,
where the 2019 report did not find these to have been taken up
in the market as much as had been previously feared and forecasted
(UNODC 2019). Supply can therefore create demand, as well as fail to
do so, and again the sociology of consumption that addresses legal trade
is well aware of this fact. Legitimate businesses often aim to create new
markets in products that consumers were hitherto unaware that they
needed or wanted. Free trials, or the ‘slippery slope’ offers of different,
‘harder’, drugs for purchasers of ‘soft’ or ‘recreational’ drugs in illicit
drug markets, would be an example of the lower end of that supply-
creates-demand dynamic. The development of a new international
trade in NPS would be at the higher end of that scale, as would the
growth of consumer markets for illegal drugs in transit regions.
Decker and Townsend Chapman’s interview study of drug
smugglers clarifies the business nature of the enterprise. Among their
respondents, roles taken in trafficking are determined by the usual
needs of a transnational commercial supply operation: organizers,
brokers, those in charge of freight, providers of warehouse space or
personnel and those who deal with the finance and money laundering.
Like all business enterprises, participants in drug trafficking operations
understand the business as comprising roles and duties and talk about
trafficking in these terms. In larger organizations, these roles and duties
may be well defined, but in smaller projects the participants may be
required to multi-task:

You see, it’s like any small business. Sometimes you are
the only person there. Your duties won’t be completely
limited to accounting. You may have to do some driving
or something like that, which I would do. Usually, a lot
of times I’d get stuck in the so-called safe house or the
warehouse. Someone has got to control the inventory, keep
track of what goes out and what comes in. That would be
my job. (Decker and Townsend Chapman 2008: 95)

Trafficking as business is more nepotistic than conventional

business, suffering none of the legal or conventional restrictions
on favouring giving jobs to friends, family and recommended
acquaintances. Potential participants who are vouched for are more
likely to be recruited, where trafficking careers are based on contacts
and reputation:

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 Drug Trafficking

If you are in the business, you can trust that you are working
with serious people. It is easy to get involved because
you know people … (Decker and Townsend Chapman
2008: 106)

At the root of all of these references to ‘the business’ by drug traffickers

is a declared self-image as a business person. In Drug Smugglers on
Drug Smuggling, the authors relay the words of five different drug
traffickers, who all consider their crimes to be simply business and
through that construction of the activity separate themselves from the
harmful consequences of the trade. Some of these quotes are worth
reproducing here in full, as they reveal precisely the identity as part
of the world of business dealings that I am suggesting throughout
this book is the framework that serves to obscure the individual’s
perceptions of the harm they are doing. The numbers refer to the
identification codes used in the study from which these quotes are
drawn, used here only to show these are five different respondents
speaking (Decker and Townsend Chapman 2008: 108):

You don’t see the damage that drugs do to people because

you only deal with classy people, you know? … You never
see nobody smoking crack … You don’t see yourself like
a drug dealer. You see yourself like a businessman. (32)

I never sold on the streets, never … I am a businessman. (29)

Organizing and touching drugs is lower-class work, I am

a businessman. (15)

No, it’s business. The guy is doing it, and I’m doing this
for this amount of money, and that’s all. He’s not thinking
about who’s going to smoke that or who’s going to die or
who’s going to do that. I mean, it doesn’t even cross his
mind. (13)

A person is only thinking of the money without thinking

of the consequences and tragedies it brings along. (720)

Seeing yourself as a businessman taking part in profitable illicit

enterprise rather than a criminal causing widespread social harm is
a frame of mind that sustains the successful drug trafficker. It allows
traffickers to compartmentalize their illicit business activities in two

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 Transnational Criminology

ways: firstly so that the business of drug trafficking is held separate in

their minds from other aspects of their personality outside this sphere
they perceive to be business enterprise; and secondly so that within
that sphere of illicit business there is a stratification between what they
are doing (just business) and what other less auspicious participants
in the drug trade may be doing (lower level dealing, causing harm).
These approaches to compartmentalization achieve a double-layered
insulation of the self from the implications of participation in harmful
illegal enterprise: in the first place, separating the private person from
the business person, and in the second place, relieving that business
person of the responsibility for the harmful effects of the trade by
placing that responsibility with other less professional criminals in the
global system of drug supply.

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