Creating a drug law enforcement research agenda

doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.01.005

International Journal of Drug Policy

Volume 41, March 2017, Pages 160-161

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.01.005 Get rights and content

Abstract

Drug law enforcement (DLE) research has been poorly funded relative to drug treatment research. The literature is slight in volume and not yet very insightful. Taking the lack of funding to represent a chronic lack of public interest in the effects of DLE, the article offers a set of suggestions for how to create of a stronger DLE research community.

Section snippets

What is to be done?

The most fundamental problem for the drug law enforcement research field is the lack of popular or official concern. In a number of countries there is a great interest in reducing the prison population and drug offenders are seen as the archetypal non-violent offender eligible for release. This has, however, not sparked a curiosity about the intensity of drug enforcement but only about the appropriateness of long sentences for minor offenses. Without that curiosity it is hard to see that there

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Cited by (11)

‘Breaking supply chains’. A commentary on the new UK Drug Strategy
2022, International Journal of Drug Policy
Citation Excerpt :
Data limitations and methodological challenges are among the reasons why there is little rigorous research on efforts to suppress drug markets. Another explanation is that drugs policing research has been poorly funded relative to drug treatment research, something arguably indicative of limited popular or official concern about the processes and impacts of enforcement (Reuter, 2017). Adding to this, Greenfield and Paoli (2017) suggest that supply control might be considered less in need of scrutiny because it typically involves the enforcement of criminal law, thereby serving to confirm social values and norms.
Reliable drug war data: The Consolidated Counterdrug Database and cocaine interdiction in the “Transit Zone”
2020, International Journal of Drug Policy
Citation Excerpt :
These constraints are rooted in a basic fact of prohibition: illicit goods are so profitable that those who trade in them will always have the resources to out-maneuver their pursuers (see also Keck and Correa-Cabrera, 2015; Toth and Mitchell, 2018; Windle and Farrell, 2012). Beyond this basic insight, however, researchers continue to know far too little about the behavior, effectiveness, and impacts of (militarized) law enforcement (Reuter, 2017; Ritter and Stevens, 2017). This can have dire consequences for drug policy-making (Greenfield and Paoli, 2017)—as when problematic UNODC data allow the global drug policy community to remain convinced that cocaine interdiction is an effective drug enforcement strategy.
For almost three decades, a U.S. government dataset has vetted and recorded all known cocaine trafficking events in the massive Western Hemisphere ‘transit zone’ (including Central America, the Caribbean, eastern Pacific, and Mexico) and tracked all cocaine seizures reported by counternarcotic forces there. This is the “cocaine module” of the Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB), and by U.S. law it is the exclusive source for performance data on key aspects of the drug interdiction mission, one of the foundations of U.S. supply-side drug policy. Nevertheless, the dataset remains poorly known or used among drug policy researchers despite being unclassified. To make the existence and strengths of this dataset better known, this paper describes its provenance, ongoing production, and analytical utility.
The analysis draws on the archive of reports produced by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, non-partisan entity that has been tracking U.S. government agencies’ drug war accounting for almost 50 years. The analysis also relies on third-party assessments of interdiction, and on correspondence with staff in the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The CCDB emerged in the 1990s following two decades of drug war failures in the transit zone. It is an “all source” product, which curates data from a variety of sources produced by the 26 U.S. agencies and 20 foreign partners involved in transit zone interdiction. There is a high threshold for inclusion of cocaine trafficking events into the CCDB; it therefore offers a highly reliable yet conservative representation of cocaine trafficking and counternarcotic response. Instances of CCDB data in the public record yield several insights: a) the volume of cocaine moving annually through the transit zone has for the past decade well exceeded 1,000 MT/year; b) cocaine seizures in the transit zone are greater than anywhere else, and significantly higher than indicated by the UNODC's World Drug Reports; c) interdiction appears to have little to no effect on cocaine prices in the U.S.; d) interdiction is highly “outcome-ineffective”; in FY2018, for example, the U.S. and partners intercepted only 6% of the cocaine trafficking events known to have occurred in the transit zone that year; e) traffickers respond quickly and constantly to interdiction by shifting their routes and transport strategies.
The CCDB deserves greater attention from researchers as a high-quality dataset that: a) challenges the “unknowability” of illicit activities and underscores the need for better sharing of unclassified government data; b) opens up new ways of exploring drug enforcement policies and actions in transit areas; c) contradicts rosy assessments of drug interdiction effectiveness by unequivocally demonstrating interdiction's longstanding and persistent failure and thus the need for fundamentally different approaches.
Drug-related police encounters across the globe: How do they compare?
2018, International Journal of Drug Policy
Citation Excerpt :
Furthermore, as evidenced by studies from Mexico and Russia, specific policing practices can lead to added harms, including unlawful arrests of people who inject drugs (PWID) for syringe possession (in spite of laws permitting carrying of injecting equipment), physical and sexual violence and police corruption and bribery (requiring people who use drugs to pay money to avoid arrest and/or jail) (Lunze et al., 2014; Miller et al., 2008; Sarang et al., 2010; Volkmann et al., 2011; Wood et al., 2017). The large investment but growing evidence of harms has spurred increasing calls for cross-national comparison of drug law enforcement approaches: to learn about where policing approaches differ and what types of approaches may be more effective (Kilmer, Reuter, & Giommoni, 2015; Reuter, 2017). As outlined by Ritter, Livingston et al. (2016) and Burris (2017) comparative policy analysis or cross-national comparisons in the illicit drug policy arena can be a very valuable method to unearth differences (and similarities) in approaches, as well as to show why these have emerged and the worth of different approaches.
Drug law enforcement subsumes the majority of drug policy expenditure across the globe. Fuelled by knowledge that much of this investment is ineffective or counter-productive there have been increasing calls for cross-national comparisons to identify where policing approaches differ and what types of approaches may be more effective. Yet, to date cross-national comparison of drug law enforcement has proven a methodologically hazardous affair. Using a new drug policing module added to the 2017 Global Drug Survey, this study seeks to provide the first cross-national comparison of the incidence, nature and intensity of illicit drug-related police encounters amongst people who use drugs.
The Global Drug Survey was administered in late 2016. Across 26 countries including Australia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, the UK and the USA a total of 45,942 people who had recently used drugs completed the drug policing module. Key variables assessed included the incidence and frequency of drug-related police encounters in the last 12 months that involved: a) being stopped and searched; b) encountering a drug detection dog; c) being given a caution or warning; d) being charged and arrested; and e) paying a bribe. Multi-level models were used to control for pre-existing national differences in drug use prevalence and non-drug specific policing (including the total number of police personnel in each country).
Drug-related police encounters were most commonly reported in Italy and Scotland. Conversely, police encounters were most likely to lead to arrest in Norway, Finland and Sweden. The type and locations of encounters further differed across countries, with for example stop and search most reported in Greece and Colombia, and encounters with drug detection dogs most reported in Scotland, Italy, UK and Australia. Multi-level models showed that the incidence of reported policing encounters continued to differ significantly across countries after controlling for pre-existing national differences in drug use prevalence and policing, and that drug policing encounters were 4 to 14 times more common in some nations than others.
The findings unearth significant cross-national differences in the incidence and nature of drug-related policing of people who use drugs. This suggests that there may be opportunities for countries to learn from each other about how and why they differ, and the potential benefits of switching to lower intensity modes of drug policing.
Drug affordability–potential tool for comparing illicit drug markets
2018, International Journal of Drug Policy
Citation Excerpt :
Successful supply reduction measures will be expected to influence increased price and/or reduced purity of street samples thus increasing the market discrepancy. Reuter (2017) recently argued for the need to ‘strengthen a fragmented and weak field’ of drug law enforcement research − this proposed measure may be a valuable tool in this regard. Dependent on the data being available, the method presented in this paper can be applied to the analysis of other drugs and levels of the market.
The importance of illicit drug price data and making appropriate adjustments for purity has been repeatedly highlighted for understanding illicit drug markets. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has been collecting retail price data for a number of drug types alongside drug-specific purity information for over 15 years. While these data are useful for a number of monitoring and analytical purposes, they are not without their limitations and there are circumstances where additional adjustment needs to be considered. This paper reviews some conceptual issues and measurement challenges relevant to the interpretation of price data. It also highlights the issues with between-country comparisons of drug prices and introduces the concept of affordability of drugs, going beyond purity-adjustment to account for varying national economies.
Based on a 2015 European data set of price and purity data across the heroin and cocaine retail markets, the paper demonstrates a new model for drug market comparative analysis; calculation of drug affordability is achieved by applying to purity-adjusted prices 2015 Price Level Indices (PLI, Eurostat).
Available data allowed retail heroin and cocaine market comparison for 27 European countries. The lowest and highest unadjusted prices per gram were observed for heroin: in Estonia, Belgium, Greece and Bulgaria (lowest) and Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Latvia (highest); for cocaine: the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom (lowest) and Turkey, Finland, Estonia and Romania (highest). The affordability per gram of heroin and cocaine when taking into account adjustment for both purity and economy demonstrates different patterns.
It is argued that purity-adjusted price alone provides an incomplete comparison of retail price across countries. The proposed new method takes account of the differing economic conditions within European countries, thus providing a more sophisticated tool for cross-national comparisons of retail drug markets in Europe. Future work will need to examine other potential uses of the drug affordability tool.
The limitations of this measure reflect primarily the limitations of the constituent data; in addition to issues inherent in collecting accurate data on illicit markets, analysis that relies on data collected from multiple countries is susceptible to discrepancies in data collection practices from country to country.
Improving knowledge on law enforcement in drug policy
2017, International Journal of Drug Policy
Interdicting International Drug Trafficking: a Network Approach for Coordinated and Targeted Interventions
2022, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research

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CommentaryCreating a drug law enforcement research agenda

Abstract

Section snippets

What is to be done?

Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment

The Lancet

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

International Journal of Drug Policy

How drug enforcement affects drug prices

Crime and Justice

Do police reduce crime? Estimates using the allocation of police forces after a terrorist attack

The American Economic Review

Commentary
Creating a drug law enforcement research agenda