Drugonomics and Data: Analyzing a New Path Forward in Counternarcotics

With any supply chain, there is a cost. This is as true for the supermarket as it is for illicit drug cartels. The only difference here is the product and where the money is funneled. Cartels must spend money, from the farmer that grows the coca or poppy, or the chemist that mixes the fentanyl, to the mule that carries it across the border. In between are a series of corrupt police officers, politicians, and other officials that create the environments needed for cartels to exploit. That means that the disruption of a farm or a processing facility has little near term economic cost for the cartel. They move the facility, or they up production at an existing facility, and they move on. What’s more costly to the cartels is to interdict a large drug load at the US border, because they have already paid along each step of the supply chain only to have it interdicted at the last step. The disruption of the supply chain at nodes closer to the US border is the costliest action US authorities can impose on the cartels.

In contrast, the elimination of a single drug kingpin has virtually zero impact on this supply chain. It may cause some short-term shake ups at the top of the organization, but the warehouse owner or box truck driver sees no change in his or her daily life. The supply chain from the farmer or chemist to the mule crossing the border continues to flow. The inbound drugs to the US did not change at all.

Once inside the US, there is a supply and demand curve just like any economics class you’ve ever taken. The supply of drugs goes up to feed a growing demand, which also correlates to the street price of drugs falling due to the larger supply. It is possible to disrupt the drug supply chain enough that the street price of the drug in question rises inside the US. This is one of the benchmarks we should use to measure the effectiveness of our supply side strategy, not whether we captured a big-name kingpin.

Raising the street price consistently is a way to create long-term strategic differences in the drug problem in the US. US drug authorities have done this a few limited times in the past few decades. If the street price of drugs goes up, some consumers will be priced out of the market. In the short-term, this may lead to desperate actions on the part of a limited number of users, but overall, it will connect perfectly to the demand side counternarcotics efforts underway in the US. There will also be users who seek treatment or potential users who never start because the prices are too high. If that happens, we are directly impacting the demand side of the curve as well.

A fallacy of the counternarcotics mission is that the supply side can ever take inbound drug shipments to zero. Similarly, the demand side will never take users down to zero, so we cannot measure success in this zero-sum way. A goal to have zero drug users in the US is destined to fail, just like a goal of having zero drug imports. Instead, we need to measure the reduction from where we are today. If we can impact the drug supply chain to such a level that we see a reduction in total users, or an increase in treatment patients, that’s a sign the strategy is working. Over multiple decades, we have plenty of data on how decapitation operations have limited impact on the number of users within and flow of drugs into the US.

Analytics

With our decades of counternarcotics operations under our belts, we have huge amounts of data to pull from. Data analytics, specifically artificial intelligence (AI), has matured to the point that we can have an AI create the optimal routes into the US given a set of conditions we know cartels require. That gives the US the advantage in the supply side mission for the first time in its history. Having cartels reacting to our movements is an excellent first step toward the supply chain disruption strategy, and one they are not used to.

Implementing AI to analyze the volumes of trafficking data on hand will create an advantage the US has never enjoyed, but it requires a change in strategy. We need to forget the strategy of decapitation and move to one of isolation. The disruption should happen where it is the costliest for the cartels: along critical nodes of the supply, and, ideally, close to the end. We need to identify those critical pieces of geography and focus our forces where we can have maximum impact with strategic interdictions, intelligence collection, and supply chain disruption.

The severity of the synthetic opioid crisis in the US makes this strategy an imperative. We cannot afford to continue to chase headlines with the capture of cartel figureheads. We need to affect real and measurable disruption to the actual flow into the United States that is reaching our citizens. This is not a singular solution to an immensely complex problem but a new way to view the problem and measure our success against what is most important. The lives of millions of Americans depend on it.

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