Whack-a-mole and globalization: A mole tells us how the drug trade works

A review of a book, “I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons,’’ a first person account of how the international drug trade prospers despite the "war on drugs." 


***Amid legitimate international economy, drug trade thrives - The Boston Globe: "The drug business — particularly the cocaine trade — has exploded into an international enterprise that towers over many of its legitimate counterparts and utilizes the arteries of 21st-century free trade in endlessly effective and ingenious ways. What’s happening in Mexico may be awful, but it’s merely the violent end of a miles-long tail.

In “I Am the Market: How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five Easy Lessons,’’ Luca Rastello, a longtime observer of the criminal economy as a journalist and think-tank director, allows a very experienced Italian “sistemista’’ — a cagey contractor who transports tons of cocaine for cartels — to explain how it works. ...

Rastello makes clear the impressive size of the cocaine trade, pushing back against the notion that small couriers are its engine. The trade, after all, is now defined by shipments by the ton; small-time smugglers sweating it out in security lines at airports may make for good stories, but that’s not where most of the money is. Such small-bore activity is dwarfed by the tons of product the cartels more typically move, one major shipment at a time.

How do they pull it off? The sistemista hammers home a point that’s surprisingly easy to forget: When you have deep pockets, a convincing veneer of legitimacy can be purchased easily. ...

The modern drug trade (is) a multibillion-dollar industry hitched at several points to the legitimate international economy and usually capable of buying its way around detection. Given the carnage unleashed in Mexico, prohibition-minded US and Mexican officials would do well to read “I Am the Market’’ and understand that while a given shipment of drugs can (sometimes) be stopped, a business that is booming beyond its barons’ wildest dreams possibly cannot."