How synthetic opioids can radically change global illegal drug markets and foreign policy
Vanda Felbab-Brown, Jonathan P. Caulkins, and Keith Humphreys Monday, April 30, 2018
Replacing drugs derived from plants (e.g., heroin, cannabis) with synthetic analogues (e.g., fentanyl, spice/K2) could be the most disruptive innovation in the history of the international drug trade. As we explain in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, it may also alter international relations and drug trafficking organizations’ power dynamics in both positive and negative ways.
Producing plant-based drugs requires control of substantial territory. Poppy production provides livelihoods to hundreds of thousands of Afghan farmers and underpins some 30 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP, for instance. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of people in the Andes cultivate coca across large geographic areas of limited state reach.
If demand shifts to synthetics, that will undermine some drug trafficking and militant groups, whose power is rooted in controlling cultivation areas—unless they can switch to producing synthetic drugs. Other criminal groups will be empowered because they will be freed from concern about working in war zones, negotiating with developing-country poor, and needing to bribe border control agents. Instead, they can synthesize their product on their own and operate close to its final market.
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Or consider Mexico. Poppy farmers in Mexico’s Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Michoacán states could lose market share to synthetic producers, particularly China and India. This could extend to coca farmers in the Andes if cheaper opioids undercut cocaine consumption or if synthetic analogues of cocaine are developed. Already, fentanyl’s spread is upending balances of power among drug trafficking groups and could reshuffle control of illegal drug retail markets in the United States and Mexico, such as between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Nuevo Generación.
More:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/04/30/how-synthetic-opioids-can-radically-change-global-illegal-drug-markets-and-foreign-policy/
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