[Key themes Seminar] How will European drug markets be affected by the Taliban opium ban? Illustrating a new approach to drug market analysis.

Key themes Seminar - State as producer of public policies and Cities, borders and mobilities key themes

Sciences Po, 9 rue de la Chaise, 75007 Paris & Zoom

Registration

A standard approach to understanding drug markets has been the Risks and Prices model (Reuter and Kleiman, 1986) and its dynamic version developed by Caulkins and Reuter (2011). Both versions assume drug markets move to an equilibrium because drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) can fairly be modeled as responding to competitive pressures by adopting available profit-motivated business practices. More recent empirical studies and the emergence of new market forms (e.g., new synthetic drugs, on-line sales, cryptomarkets) have increased the need for models that address when, how, and why DTOs develop new business practices while taking account of such distinctive aspects of illegal drug markets as the relatively slow pace at which these markets innovate and reach a new equilibrium. By focusing attention on entrepreneurial decision making and the heterogeneity of enterprises, Evolutionary Economic Theory (EET; Nelson and Winter, 1982) may be helpful in this regard. This presentation presents our first effort to fit stylized facts about illegal drug markets into the capacious framework of EET. The presentation also considers what insights this approach might offer on the consequences of the 2023 Taliban opium ban for European drug markets, taking into account the varied responses to the 2001 ban.

Speaker

Peter Reuter is Professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. He was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2019 and in 2020 became a Distinguished University Professor. He served as editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management from 1999-2004. He founded and directed RAND's Drug Policy Research Center from 1989-1993.

His early research focused on the organization of illegal markets and resulted in the publication of Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (MIT Press, 1983), which won the Leslie Wilkins award as most outstanding book of the year in criminology and criminal justice. In 2001 he co-authored (with Robert MacCoun) Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Places, Times, and Vices (Cambridge University Press). In 2004 he co-authored (with Edwin Truman) Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering. Since then he had co-authored three other books, all published by Oxford University Press. He has also chaired three National Academy of Science panels. Dr. Reuter received his PhD in Economics from Yale.

Chair

Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, Sciences Po, CERI

Discussants

Marcela Alonso Ferreira, Sciences Po, CEE

Federico Varese, Sciences Po, CEE

*co-organized by the State as producer of public policies and Cities, borders and mobilities key themes

**The link will be sent to you after your registration