Narconomics Quotes

“Look at the evolution of the price of a kilogram of the drug, as it makes its way from the Andes to Los Angeles. To make that much cocaine, one needs somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 kilograms of dried coca leaves. Based on price data from Colombia obtained by Gallego and Rico, that would cost about $385. Once this is converted into a kilo of cocaine, it can sell in Colombia for $800. According to figures pulled together by Beau Kilmer and Peter Reuter at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank, that same kilo is worth $2,200 by the time it is exported from Colombia, and it has climbed to $14,500 by the time it is imported to the United States. After being transferred to a midlevel dealer, its price climbs to $19,500. Finally, it is sold by street-level dealers for $78,000.10 Even these soaring figures do not quite get across the scale of the markups involved in the cocaine business. At each of these stages, the drug is diluted, as traffickers and dealers “cut” the drug with other substances, to make it go further. Take this into account, and the price of a pure kilogram of cocaine at the retail end is in fact about $122,000.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Heroin has a frightening reputation, and rightly so: the margin between an effective dose and an overdose is narrower than that of any other mainstream narcotic. A paper in Addiction, an academic journal, estimated the quantity of various drugs needed to get an average person high versus the amount required to kill them.5 In the case of alcohol, it found that the ratio was about ten to one—in other words, if a couple of shots of vodka are enough to make you tipsy, twenty shots might kill you, if you can keep them down. Cocaine, it found, was slightly safer, with a ratio of fifteen to one. LSD has a ratio of 1,000 to one, whereas marijuana is safest of all: it is impossible to die of overdose, as far as anyone can tell. Even with the edibles, there is no evidence that one can die of overdose—you simply have a stronger and longer-lasting effect than you may have wanted. For heroin, the ratio between an effective dose and a deadly one is just six to one. Given that batches vary dramatically in their purity, each shot is a game of Russian roulette. Dealers”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“It is a testament to the success of cartels in laundering their images that millions of consumers buy drugs each year without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that they are funding unimaginable suffering”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Economists have another way of measuring the “centrality” of a node in a network: rather than simply counting the number of connections, they take into account how many connections each of those connections has, and so on. If I have one hundred friends and you have only ten, I might appear better connected than you. But if your ten friends include people who are themselves very well connected—Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Justin Bieber—you may be more influential than me after all. (Google’s page-ranking system works in a similar way: it measures not only how many sites link to a page, but how many sites link to those sites, and so on. Being linked to once by the New York Times counts for more than being linked to by a dozen unknown blogs.)”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“The cops aren’t the only ones who hunt for cannabis farms in this way: criminals in Birmingham, England, have been caught using drones equipped with infrared cameras to spot hidden grow-sites, to rob or extort the owners. “They are fair game,” a drone-using extortionist told the local Halesowen News. “It is not like I’m using my drone to see if people have nice televisions. I am just after drugs to steal and sell. If you break the law then you enter me and my drone’s world.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“Banning drugs, which seems sensible at first, has handed the exclusive rights to a multibillion-dollar industry to the most ruthless organized crime networks in the world.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Sending a teenager to jail costs more than it would to send him to Eton College,”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“new disciples of La Familia Michoacana, a bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartel, are reportedly forced to read the works of John Eldredge, an American author of Christian self-help books.)”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“The vast increase in spending on border security has inadvertently transformed the people-smuggling business from an optional, cheap, amateur affair into a near-compulsory, very expensive, and cartel-dominated one. It is a gift to organized crime.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Attempts to raise the price of cocaine by forcing up the cost of coca leaves is a bit like trying to drive up the price of art by raising the cost of paint. Gerhard”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“governments should consider ways to shape these markets, rather than simply charge into battle to shut them down at any cost”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Sending a teenager to jail costs more than it would to send him to Eton College, the private boarding school in England that educated Princes William and Harry. It seems especially odd that the United States, a country with a proud history of limited government, is so unquestioningly generous when it comes to this particular public service, on which it blows $80 billion a year. Does it really need to lock up five times as many people per capita as Britain, six times as many as Canada, and nine times as many as Germany”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Officials in the state’s Department of Public Safety executed an operation that, at a stroke, seized more than $1.6 billion in drugs from organized crime. The operation was notable for its stealthiness. It was carried out without a single shot being fired, or a single person being hurt. In fact, no officers even had to get up from their desks, let alone draw their weapons. The billion-dollar bust was made when officials decided that instead of calculating the value of the drugs they seized at the border using wholesale prices, they would instead calculate them using much higher retail prices. With a single tweak to a spreadsheet, the value of drugs intercepted in the state shot up from $161 million to $1.8 billion. Conveniently, the tenfold upward revision came just a week before the department was due to hand in a performance review.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“It estimated that for every $1 million spent on controlling supply in “source countries” in Latin America, there would be a reduction of about 10 kilograms in the total amount of cocaine consumed in the United States. If $1 million were spent trying to intercept cocaine further down the supply chain, on its way to America, that would save more like 20 kilograms. Prevention programs in schools were a bit more effective, saving about 25 kilograms per $1 million.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“onslaught from a big, well-funded household name. The way the industry is set up means that large companies would have big advantages: better able to navigate complex regulations; better placed to exploit the economies of scale inherent in agriculture; and better able to reassure nervous new customers, with a trusted, nationally known brand.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“All you have to do is look at Colorado: real estate is up, 30,000 jobs added, retail is up, state tax [revenues] up.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“Near where I grew up in northern England is the town of Saltaire, created by Sir Titus Salt, a Victorian wool magnate who believed so strongly in temperance that the town was built without a single pub. (The principle has been undermined in recent years by the opening of a bar called Don’t Tell Titus.)”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Sellers are forced to compete more seriously on price, quality, and customer service, rather than being able to stay in business simply because they have built the rare set of contacts required to make it work.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“Trust, something that one might think would be hard to establish in an anonymous environment where the players are all crooks, is earned using a “feedback” system modeled on eBay’s.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“The result is that incumbents stay in business, facing only limited competition, even as they charge high prices for poor service.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“Despite international bans on the leaf, the Bolivian state supports various national industries that churn out all manner of coca-related products, from sweets, cookies, and drinks to coca-infused toothpaste. The industry is regulated by the Vice-Ministry of Coca, which imposes the limits on how much of the leaf can be grown. The”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“The number of people murdered in Mexico in 2010 would reach more than twenty thousand, or”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Quizá también se deba a que la facilidad de comprar en línea abre el mercado de las drogas a una nueva gama de clientes. Hasta ahora, tratar de conseguir drogas ha sido difícil y a menudo desagradable, pues se requiere una red de contactos poco fiables o realizar una angustiosa excursión a un callejón oscuro. Comprar en línea lo hace más fácil y le otorga una cara casi respetable a un negocio sucio.”
― Tom Wright, Narconomics: Cómo administrar un cartel de la droga

“because criminal organizations cannot use the legal system, violence is the only way for them to enforce contractual agreements. But”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How To Run a Drug Cartel

“Tal como a lager foi inventada para convencer mais mulheres a beber cerveja e os cigarros light foram desenvolvidos tendo em mente fumadores preocupados com a saúde, os produtos de canábis comestíveis ou bebíveis podem muito bem abrir um novo mercado de potenciais charrados que não gostam da ideia de fumar um charro.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“O vasto aumento da despesa na segurança fronteiriça transformou inadvertidamente o negócio do tráfico de pessoas de uma questão opcional, barata e amadora numa questão quase obrigatória, muito dispendiosa e dominada pelos cartéis. É uma bênção para o crime organizado.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Ao contrário da maioria das partes da Internet, onde o anonimato torna as pessoas mais mal-educadas do que na vida real, o mundo do tráfico de drogas parece ser mais simpático online do que na rua.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Os traficantes de droga mexicanos são exaltados em narcocorridos, baladas animadas acompanhadas por trombone e acordeão que contam acerca das suas façanhas e da sua habilidade em enganar a polícia.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“Traficar dinheiro para fora da Europa tornou-se muito mais fácil devido à existência da nota de 500 euros, uma nota bancária com um valor ridiculamente elevado que facilitou e muito a vida aos criminosos, que conseguem esconder 20000 euros num único maço de cigarros.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

“A única forma que as organizações criminosas têm de fazer cumprir os contratos é através da violência, razão pela qual a capacidade de intimidar e matar está no âmago do sucesso de qualquer cartel de droga. Mas usar de violência é um procedimento dispendioso e mau para o negócio.”
― Tom Wainwright, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel