The Drug Enforcement Administration reported last year that its heroin seizures decreased by almost 70 percent, while its fentanyl seizures increased by nearly 451 percent between 2019 and 2023. However, as I recently reported, heroin has been reemerging among illicit drug users in the United States over the past year, particularly in Western states. Meanwhile, a different class of synthetic opioids called nitazenes are making deeper inroads in Europe and the UK and began appearing in US toxicology samples in 2019.
As research chemist Josh Bloom and I have written, nitazenes can be up to 10 times more potent than fentanyl. Derived from benzimidazole, a compound used to make a variety of helpful medicines ranging from blood pressure pills to antacids to antifungal agents, the precursors of drugs like isotonitazene, or “iso,” and etonitazene are produced and distributed worldwide.
When law enforcement erects obstacles to the trafficking of specific drugs, it causes drug trafficking organizations to innovate new ones. Just as water in a stream flows around boulders and still reaches its destination, the lure of enormous profits ensures that drug traffickers find their way to customers. Policymakers shouldn’t be surprised if new drug crises emerge to replace the present fentanyl crisis.
As my colleague Daniel Raisbeck and I wrote last year, the Mexican drug cartels are better understood as transnational criminal organizations operating in many South American countries and collaborating with drug trafficking organizations in Europe and the Middle East. Turkish, Kurdish, and Pakistani criminal networks have partnered with British criminal organizations to market illicit drugs in the UK, and Albanian and Italian criminal organizations bring much of the illegal drugs into Europe and, to some extent, the United States. The Albanian mafia has partnered with Mexican drug cartels. Both have established bases of operation in Ecuador.
Policymakers in the United States never seem to learn from past mistakes. Previous attempts to root out drug trafficking organizations south of the border, such as President Clinton’s Plan Colombia, begun in 2000, have failed to stop the flow of drugs. Cocaine, the main target of Plan Colombia, is more available than ever and extremely cheap. The trafficking organizations shifted their base of operations from Colombia to Central America and Mexico. Drug prohibition has enabled these transnational organizations to generate immense profits, allowing them to build formidable armies. If the United States launches a military intervention in Mexico in a doomed effort to fight the drug war, it will likely lead to chaos similar to the Afghanistan debacle.
Taxing American consumers who purchase products from or contain inputs from Mexico and Canada will be equally ineffective. We are dealing with a network of transnational criminal organizations that can reconfigure their bases of production and distribution of illegal drugs in an amoeba-like fashion. Tariffs will punish American consumers, damaging relations with neighboring countries and possibly destabilizing their governments.
If lawmakers aim to deliver a significant blow to transnational criminal organizations, they should adopt the strategy that successfully removed organized crime from the bootleg alcohol trade: end drug prohibition. Legalize and regulate all drugs to reduce violence, undercut the cartels, and protect consumers.