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NARCONOMICS: HOW TO RUN A DRUG CARTEL by TOM WAINWRIGHT

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“The vast increase in spending on border security has inadvertently transformed the people-smuggling business from an optional, cheap, amateur affair into a near-compulsory, very expensive, and cartel-dominated one. It is a gift to organised crime.”

“Attempts to raise the price of cocaine by forcing up the cost of coca leaves is a bit like trying to drive up the price of art by raising the cost of paint. Gerhard”

“Warren Buffett, the “Sage of Omaha” whose shrewd investments have made him one of the world’s richest men, has a stake in the marijuana industry via Cubic Designs, a company that provides mezzanine floor-space for warehouses. Cubic Designs dropped flyers off at 1,000 marijuana dispensaries, urging them to “double your growing space,” with a picture of metal flooring loaded with cannabis plants. The Sage himself made no comment.”

🚀 3 Standout Points

Why the legalisation of drugs could be advantageous to society

Why cutting the amount of drugs can lead to higher profits for the cartels

How some drug cartels recruit their members.

📒 Summary + Notes

Are successful international companies and drug cartels so different after all? Not, according to the insightful observations of Tom Wainwright in Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel. While the intriguing book title may lure readers into assuming this is a clandestine guide on how to operate a drug cartel, Wainwright’s book is a proposal for how to better defeat drug cartels. 

There have been multitudes of books providing divergent explanations for the illicit activities of transnational criminal organisations, but none of the assessments are as unique and clear-cut as the one provided in this book.

Wainwright is sweating it out in an airport bathroom in the notorious Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, attempting to activate his safety tracking device provided by a security consultant as an aid in case he disappears during his perilous journey. Frighteningly, the device turns out to be defective, and Wainwright makes his way into the “world’s most murderous city” without the safety net of a location tracker. The process of conducting the investigations for this book took remarkable courage and tenacity.

The book consists of an introduction, ten chapters, a conclusion, acknowledgements, notes, index, and black-and-white photographs. Wainwright creates imaginative chapter titles to entice the readers:

Chapter 1: Cocaine’s Supply Chain: The Cockroach Effect and the 30,000 Percent Markup

Chapter 2: Competition vs. Collusion: Why Merger Is Sometimes Better Than Murder

Chapter 3: The People Problems of a Drug Cartel: When James Bond Meets Mr Bean

Chapter 4: PR and the Mad Men of Sinaloa: Why Cartels Care About Corporate Social Responsibility

Chapter 5: Offshoring: The Perks of Doing Business on the Mosquito Coast

Chapter 6: The Promise and Perils of Franchising: How the Mob Has Borrowed from McDonald’s

Chapter 7: Innovating Ahead of the Law: Research and Development in the “Legal Highs” Industry

Chapter 8: Ordering a Line Online: How Internet Shopping Has Improved Drug Dealers’ Customer Service

Chapter 9: Diversifying into New Markets: From Drug Smuggling to People Smuggling

Chapter 10: Coming Full Circle: How Legalization Threatens the Drug Lords

In the book, Wainwright draws a comparison between prominent legitimate businesses and various drug cartels. His investigation for this comparison takes him beyond the borders of Central, North, and South America, and he cleverly guides readers from his meeting with an anti-drug squad in the Dominican Republic to explore the “legal highs” industry in New Zealand, and finally to purchasing illegal products online through special web browsers in the “Dark Web.”

Wainwright exposes how although multinational companies like Burger King, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Pepsi do not typically engage in the brutal activities of those involved in illicit drug production—the murdering of government officials, torturing of business competitors, or the use of grotesque violence to honour contractual agreements, for example—criminal enterprises do, in many respects, operate like any large lawful corporation.

This includes encountering those mundane and tedious complications that come to occupy all legally operated businesses. Drug cartels, like competitive corporations, are concerned with supply chain dynamics, recruiting and retaining new employees, competition and collusion, human resources, potential mergers and takeovers, public relations, offshoring, franchising, research and development, online sales, customer satisfaction, and diversification into new markets.

These challenges require drug cartel leaders to develop business acumen, and to implement innovative solutions to placate and satisfy the needs of their consumers and employees.

Wainwright then delves into how drug cartels expand their enterprises to increase their profit, compete globally while gaining influence, and how they collude with other transnational criminal organizations to obtain optimal results. The interconnected operations of various transnational criminal organisations now require different nations to form partnerships to deter the proliferation of illegal activities.

In his conclusion, Wainwright takes readers another insightful step forward, discussing four main mistakes being made when trying to combat the illegal drug industry: (1) the obsession with supply, (2) saving money early on and paying for it later, (3) acting nationally against a global business, and (4) confusing prohibition with control. 

By the end, Wainwright not only convincingly depicts how drug cartels emulate successful businesses, but he also provides an assessment on the efficacy of current methods governments use to combat the sale and transportation of illegal drugs. 

In the last two chapters, Wainwright reveals his stance against current prohibition laws. He counts them as a costly and inadequate approach for dealing with the problems associated with illegal drugs. He believes that the legalisation of marijuana, and potentially other illicit drugs, will deter the drug cartels from making a profit and render those organisations ineffective.

The cartels are innovative organisations and will adapt to new challenges and regulations, just as businesses do; and, just as businesses are opportunistic, so will the cartels quickly pursue new ventures to meet their financial objectives. As marijuana is becoming a less lucrative product, transnational criminal organizations are diversifying the types of drugs they smuggle. For example, cartels have already started to produce and distribute fentanyl, methamphetamine, and heroin in and into the United States. These crime groups have also thrived from non-drug activities like illegal mining, extortion, kidnapping, human smuggling, and sex trafficking.
Historically, illicit drugs are produced in greater quantities in Mexico and distributed more prolifically in the United States.

The author provides a thought-provoking book for scholars, government officials, law enforcement officers, researchers, practitioners, and interested stakeholders on how drug cartels operate and puts forth an insightful approach to defeating such criminal organizations.

 

📚 Buy This Book 

NARCONOMICS: HOW TO RUN A DRUG CARTEL by TOM WAINWRIGHT

 

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