Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies ...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies:
A Review of the Literature
competitors, and encouraging trafficking organizations to become organized crime groups…”
(President’s Commission on Organized Crime, 1986:388).
The President’s Commission (1986:421-425) was also skeptical about crop
reduction/substitution and eradication programs. Source countries may have little incentive to
reduce crop production as this may undermine the economic and political stability of their
countries. Also, drugs that are illicit in North America may be consumed in those countries
(often as part of local traditions); hence, consumption is viewed as an American problem.
Farmers in these countries may not have alternative crops that can provide the income generated
by illicit drug crops. Furthermore, governments in many producing countries are weak and
unable to control crop production. They may also be hostile to the US and hence unmotivated to
curtail production.
Most importantly, perhaps, the list of source countries is not fixed; therefore, crop reductions in
one country are often compensated for by increases in other countries. With regard to the last
point, the successful eradication with herbicides of opium poppies grown in some parts of
Northern Mexico during the 1970s reduced Mexican heroin production; however, within five
years this reduction was replaced by heroin from Southeast Asia. The use of spraying has also
been objected to on the basis that the herbicides and pesticides used are highly toxic (Del Omo,
1987).
Crop eradication efforts aimed at the coca crop in Bolivia and Peru, and the poppy crop along the
Afghan-Pakistani border, have also met with dismal failure (Shannon, 1988:364-367; Atlas,
1988). Bolivia, for example, received economic aid from Washington and the United Nations
Fund for Drug-Abuse Control to compensate farmers for the transition from coca to legal crops,
in return for its agreement, in 1987, to eradicate all coca grown for export within three years.
Various domestic pressures in Bolivia conspired to undermine this plan and, by the end of the
first year, just 500 acres of coca had been eradicated by the government.
Notwithstanding these concerns, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime (1986:425)
did not rule out source country control programs. The Commission called for such programs to
target countries and crops selectively, arguing that crop reduction could reduce the availability of
illicit drugs on a temporary basis. It argued that these efforts should be pursued in those
countries in which the political and economic climate was favourable to their successful
application.
Overall, the Commission (1986:429) concluded that supply reduction has been of limited success
and that the 75-year history of this approach in the US has “not reduced the social, economic, or
crime problems related to drugs…America’s war on drugs seems nowhere close to success.
Now more than ever, drugs present problems of vast proportions.”
As an indication of the limitations of the supply reduction strategy, the President’s Commission
(1986:429) considered an estimated 10 percent interdiction rate, achieved in 1983, to be a
success. Even if this rate could be increased, Latin America’s coca growing could be raised
accordingly. Despite some high-profile drug seizures in South Florida in the 1980s, Customs
agents can inspect just a small fraction of the seven million shipping containers landing each
50 | Research and Statistics Division / Department of Justice Canada