Cartels Demonstrate the Utter Failure of the War on Drugs: New at Reason

To understand how drug cartels work, we should consider the industry as we would any other that has to deal with regular business problems–how to hire the best personnel, how to handle the competition, how to deliver product to customers, and so on.

That is what Tom Wainwright sets out to do in his new book Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel. “Regulatory approaches that in the ordinary business world would be discarded for their ineffectiveness have been allowed to endure for years in the world of counternarcotics,” says the author, a former correspondent in Mexico for The Economist. Ian Vasquez, director of the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute, explores Wainright’s book and how drug cartels operate in Latin America.

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