A More Effective Approach to Supply Side Narcotics Strategy in the Time of Fentanyl

Historically, the role of Drug Cartel Kingpin has come with some…occupational hazards. Sure, a rival cartel might come after you and your family or you may have to put down some intra-cartel ambition for your job. But you would also find yourself at the very center of the supply side strategy of United States. The US and its allies have for over 30 years engaged in a decapitation strategy regarding cartels abroad. Instead, the US and its allies should make the role of Drug Cartel Kingpin the safest job in the cartel industry and should increase the occupational hazards of other roles. Those roles that are strategically important to the supply chain and whose disruption will cause Kingpins to turn into isolated and ineffective figureheads as their pet tiger-supporting income slowly dries up.  Instead of capturing and extraditing cartel leaders, we should leave them in place and tear down their infrastructure around them. As they struggle to pay their suppliers, they will slip into irrelevance. The hazardous jobs should be the ones along the supply chain, not the cartel leader. Let them spend their dwindling income on pet tigers all they want.   To achieve this, we need a scalable way to identify the strategically important nodes in the drug supply chain. This means knowing which coastal villages are critically important and the US border crossings that are the most favorable to cartels. That means we need to think like they would. We need to create routes INTO the US and find which of them is the most optimal given a set of conditions necessary for cartel operations. Once this is done, we can effectively and efficiently deploy our forces to the locations that are most critical. Intelligence collection can be vectored against these areas enabling law enforcement to not only interdict loads but to tear down the infrastructure that allows the cartels to use this location. Once that is gone, the cartels will have to go to the next, sub-optimal location and rebuild. Rebuilding means coming out into the open and bribing new officials, buying new phones, and renting new trucks, all from an untrusted network. That opens new intelligence collection opportunities, which means new opportunities for more disruption. Using the right technology, we can scale this approach and make a measurable difference against the real goal: reduction of drug flows into the US.   Interdiction is not the only way to disrupt inbound loads. In fact, interdiction alone will never catch up to the total number of individual loads being sent to the US by the cartels. That’s why the pictures of police commissioners in front of seized bales of drugs is laughable. The cartels are almost certainly sending those loads so that they are interdicted so that we feel like we accomplished something so that we look the other way while they send 15 more. We will never interdict our way out of the drug trafficking problem, but we can use interdictions more strategically. As a part of the optimal location and disruption strategy, we interdict loads to cause maximum financial impact. Instead of publicizing them, keep the interdictions quiet. Once we know they are sending loads through a certain piece of geography, we want them to KEEP doing it so we can continue to interdict, and we can turn traffickers into informants on our behalf. Once they catch on or once word leaks to them, they will have already lost millions in revenue, and they’ve also lost the location that was once trusted. The cost of losing the location is BY FAR higher over the long term. The loss of 20 locations along a supply chain could be catastrophic.   Job Security   The most contemporary example is the capture, escape, recapture, and extradition of El Chapo Guzman of Sinaloa Cartel fame. The world’s major news outlets carried the story of his capture, which was complete with celebrity appearances and a tunnel escape. These stories captivate us the same way the story of Tony Montana continues to hold our attention. There’s something about the idea of an infinitely wealthy cartel lord standing on his mansion balcony looking down at his pet tigers and thumbing his nose at the governments and militaries that pursue him. It’s like a turbocharged Robin Hood story and who doesn’t love Robin Hood? The problem is that it makes for a bad supply side strategy. Instead of capturing cartel leaders, we should isolate them and make them irrelevant by tearing down the infrastructure that enables their activities. The infrastructure is what matters in supply side strategy because the goal is to reduce the flow of cocaine into the US.  After decades of pursuing and extraditing (or otherwise eliminating) cartel leaders in Mexico and Colombia (as well as other minor leaders in Central America), Americans associate the idea of supply side counternarcotics with arrested cartel leaders on the perp walk in front of the media. Those who view this strategy critically can correctly deduce that it has not been historically effective. When El Chapo was captured, was there a measurable difference in the amount of US-bound cocaine into the US? Likely not. It created short term upheavals in the Sinaloa cartel but between El Mencho and El Chapo’s son, the operation was still running. One might even argue that the cartel was better off without the high profile El Chapo attracting attention. The goal of a supply side strategy is not to knock off as many cartel leaders as possible. The goal is to measurably impact the amount of cocaine that makes it inside the US. This is a worthy goal but one that is not accomplished by the single-minded pursuit of high-profile cartel leaders.   A much more stable job in the drug trade is that of corrupt police officer in a strategically important village or town that serves as a critical transit node. Maybe you own a warehouse that the cartels use to store their wares. Maybe you own a fleet of box trucks that are used to run cocaine loads from the coastal village to the stash house. In any of those roles, you are MUCH safer than if you are the cartel head. But you shouldn’t be. What is missing from the US’s traditional supply side counternarcotics strategy is that there are critically important pieces of geography that, if disrupted, create significant changes in the ability of the cartel to ship its drugs northward to the US.   Cocaine is native to Peru and grown in Colombia and Ecuador. It’s usually processed there before having to make the trip north. Small bush planes cannot carry enough to achieve economies of scale, so the maritime route is the best option. But you wouldn’t want to sail so far north that you encounter the US Coast Guard so it is better to make landfall as far north in Central America as you can. What enables you to do that is that you’ve paid off the right people in the coastal village and you have the infrastructure to be effective. That means things like paved roads that lead to isolated beaches where Pangas can offload their bales. From there, you need a safe network that crosses borders all the way through Mexico to the US border. At the US border, you need places to lay low before the conditions are optimal to cross at a strategically important crossing area. Maybe an official crossing, maybe not. The point is that this network is SIGNIFICANTLY more important to the cartels than a single leader.  The same is true for the trafficking of other drugs like heroin and fentanyl. The locations of origin are different as significant quantities of fentanyl are made in Mexico today. The route is shorter, but the same logic applies. There must be a network of people that enable the safe passage of fentanyl to the US border. This is the vulnerability point and it is what our counter-fentanyl strategy should be centered on. If this were to happen, it could substantially hurt the cartels’ supply chains at the costliest node. An impact like this would ensure the passage of fentanyl across the US order would become less efficient and less optimized, keeping Americans safer. In the next part of this series, the impact of targeting cartel supply nodes on drugonomics will be discussed in detail.