Brute force is no match for today’s high-tech drug-runners

HeLLFIRE MISSILES used to strike terrorist hideouts in the mountains of Afghanistan. Now they rain down on the sparkling waters of the Caribbean. Small boats and their crews, alleged drug-traffickers, are incinerated. On October 15th videos of the latest strike, the fifth in recent weeks, went viral on social media. President Donald Trump is prosecuting a new war on drugs with the deployment of military force and unprecedented violence. He talks of attacking Venezuela, whose president, Nicolás Maduro, he calls a “narco-terrorist”. The template is the war on terror. The trouble is that Mr Trump is chasing a new narcotics industry which is more innovative and nebulous than ever.

America’s president has identified a grave problem for the world, and his country in particular. The consumption of illicit drugs—particularly cocaine and synthetic opioids like fentanyl, often in combination—kills roughly 600,000 people every year. Many of those deaths are from opioid overdoses. These occur disproportionately in the United States, where people fall victim at about ten times the rate in the rest of the world.

Cocaine and synthetic opioids generate staggering profits. A kilogram of cocaine might fetch 120 times its laboratory-door costs; for synthetics like fentanyl the figure is closer to 1,000. The fight to own those profits causes another 100,000 deaths each year. The cashflows corrupt weak states, ruining the economic prospects of tens of millions of their citizens. And the problem is growing. Consumption is booming in Europe and rising fast even in Africa and Asia. When traffickers carve out new routes to serve new markets, violence and death follow.

As we report, surging demand and those huge profits are powering a revolution in drug-sellers’ way of doing business. Forget Pablo Escobar. His style of command and control, with vertically integrated operations linking Andean coca-leaf farms to the streets of Miami, has been replaced by fluid, competing networks of specialist subcontractors. Big brand-name gangs often own the drugs, but they operate only one part of the chain. The rest belongs to logistics experts, thugs-for-hire, chemists, brokers who trade precursors and digital financiers. The profits are recycled by cross-border Chinese money-laundering groups with expertise in cryptocurrencies.

This distributed and outsourced model is adaptive and resilient. Its specialisation favours innovation—witness the narco submarines crossing the Pacific packed with drugs. Changing routes is easy. If one way is blocked, gangs simply use a different subcontractor somewhere else. The result is that trafficking and violence spread quickly and widely.

Apparently immune countries have come under threat from the trade. In sleepy Uruguay traffickers recently attacked the public prosecutor’s home. Gang violence is surging in some European port cities, such as Antwerp. In the Pacific, on the expanding route to Asia, Fiji has called in the armed forces to fight drug-smugglers. The layering of contracts makes it much easier for bent politicians and business people, known as “invisible narcos”, to take a role in the trade. For every case in which this is uncovered, scores more remain hidden.

The most effective single way to reduce the death, violence and corruption would be to legalise and regulate the production and consumption of cocaine. This would eliminate the price premium that motivates the world’s most violent criminals. Consumers could be sure of dosage and quality—an incentive to shun dangerous illegal concoctions. Prisons would be emptier and the criminal-justice system could focus on deadlier synthetics. Alas, in most consuming countries neither voters nor politicians are interested.

That limits governments to a set of weaker tools. On the demand side, addiction programmes and public-health campaigns pay back twice. They lower drug deaths and harm, and cut demand. That is important. Without such cuts, reducing the supply by, say, eradicating fields of coca plants, just pushes up the price. And that calls forth more supply.

On the supply side, although pulverising small boats in the Caribbean is popular with Mr Trump’s supporters, it is almost certainly illegal and ultimately unlikely to make much difference. Little of the hard drugs brought to the United States come via the Caribbean, as they did in Escobar’s day. Any that do can easily be rerouted up the Pacific coast. Destroying boats does not much raise drug-owners’ costs.

Instead, governments should focus on gathering intelligence about every link in the trafficking networks and then prosecuting each of them—especially the most powerful. Bombs may scare boat crews, but the paymasters worry about the police appearing at their infinity pool, or freezing their accounts. Investigators must expose the financiers and white-collar enablers. As they raise the cost of doing business, the incentives change, especially if demand is squeezed, too.

This is a task for intelligence officers, police and prosecutors, not the army. Traffickers are entangled with cops, prosecutors, judges and politicians, particularly in Latin America, so infiltration by the villains will be a growing danger. Gangs these days run their own candidates in Mexico’s local elections. Peru’s parliament has passed a series of laws that protect criminals and cripple investigations. Weak states in the Pacific, Asia and Europe are also at risk.

However, there are also glimmers of hope. Fighting fentanyl in Mexico, the Trump administration mostly uses an intelligence-led approach. It is also urging China to scrub its laundering networks. Elsewhere America’s method is less effective. It has imposed sanctions to settle political scores in Brazil, while letting politicians accused of corruption back into its banking system and gutting money-laundering laws at home. Without legalisation, the fight against illicit drugs is uphill. If the immense harm they cause is to be reduced, Mr Trump will have to shift his strategy to reflect the new narconomics—no matter how dramatic Hellfire strikes look on TikTok. ■