2025-06-12 –, BS 3.17 - 44 cap.
This paper undertakes a multi-case study analysis of drug market interventions and exogenous shocks to systematically evaluate the efficacy of current approaches to drug market management. The case studies are: Sky ECC, criminal gangs in Ireland, criminal gangs in Cape Town, the dissolution of FARC guerrillas in Colombia, COVID-19 policing shocks in Rio de Janeiro, and the collapse of the Beltrán-Leyva cartel in Mexico. Through an analysis of the market and criminal disruptions the paper enables an evaluation of key critiques of drug market policing. The current approach to illicit drug market management is based on the premise the police enforcement can both reduce drug market scale and associated violence. Through a mixture of interviews, data analysis and academic and grey literature review, we evaluate a number of case studies from around the world, examining drug market shifts and outcomes in response to enforcement. Data is drawn from a myriad of sources including EUDA, UNODC, European Commission and national databases. Our findings confirm many of the critiques of existing approaches to drug market management. Namely, that enforcement can deliver successes in terms of removing corrosive criminal actors and ensuring state control over its territory, but that it has almost no effect on drug market supply or trends, and that in many cases it may simply fuel or cause violence within the market. Even in major successful enforcement cases, such as Sky ECC, spikes in seizures typically abate as criminal markets adapt. While we observe some potential short-term displacement of trafficking routes and disruption of operations, we observe limited, if any, long-term trend shifts in drug supply or demand.
Lead author: Dr John Collins, The Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
Assistant Author: Elijah Glantz
Contributing Authors: Dr Bruno Pantaleão de Oliveira (Data analysis; Brazil and Mexico); Alastair Greig (Sky ECC, Europe); Andrés Felipe Aponte González (Colombia); Michael McClaggan (South Africa).
John is Director of Academic Engagement at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, based in our office in Vienna.
John also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development (JIED), LSE Press, and Board member of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSPD). He is a Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Hong Kong and a Visiting Fellow at Shanghai University.
At GI-TOC, John leads a series of academic engagement projects, including serving as Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC); Research Coordinator for our collaboration with the SOC ACE project hosted by the University of Birmingham; GI-TOC lead for our Drugs and Development Hub collaboration with GIZ GPDPD; and coordinator for a major Open Society Foundations project examining the intersection of drug policy reform and organized crime. John has focused on building research and policy capacity in a number of core GI-TOC focus areas, including West Africa, Ukraine, Colombia, Brazil, East and Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.
Before joining the GI, John was Founding Executive Director of the LSE’s International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU), a Fellow of the LSE US Centre and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalization.
John’s historical research focuses on the political economy of international drug control. He earned a PhD from the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. John’s contemporary policy interests focus on the political economy of international drug control and the evolving dynamics on national and international policy reforms. In 2022 he published a book on the Regulatory History of UN Drug Control with Cambridge University Press.