Background: Illegal drug markets are important because they supply drugs that create harms (overdose, addiction, etc.) and because they create harms directly (violence, corruption, etc.). It is common in the drug policy literature to compare illegal drug markets to legal drug markets (e.g., compare cannabis markets before and after legalization, or compare cocaine to alcohol). This project compares illegal drug markets to illegal markets for other goods and services (wildlife trafficking, human smuggling, money laundering, illegal guns, etc.).
Objectives: The objective is to assemble salient contrasts, and similarities. There is no attempt to evaluate any one policy or test any specific hypothesis. The motivation is scientific curiosity, not applied, but insights from comparisons can bring fresh perspectives.
Methods: Teams of leading scholars on ten different types of illegal markets – with one of the ten being drug markets – were invited to (1) Write papers describing the salient characteristics of “their” markets and then (2) Attend a two-day workshop to discuss the contrasts and commonalities. This paper synthesizes key insights from that collective endeavor.
Results and Implications: Drug markets are distinctive in ways recognized ways (e.g., conspicuously high value-to-weight ratios that facilitate smuggling) and ways that are not always appreciated (e.g., most drugs are consumed by people who purchase frequently, even daily, which leads to a truly extraordinary number of retail transactions, and hence an unusual set of negative externalities). Recognizing which distinctive traits of illegal drug markets come from the “physics” of the product, and not just illegality, offers valuable perspectives.