Narconomics

The truth is that buying and taking illegal drugs probably won’t kill you. But it may very well kill someone else. Cocaine, for instance, is manufactured and exported exclusively by cartels that use murder and torture as part of their business model.

Prison is fabulously expensive. Sending a teenager to jail costs more than it would to send him to Eton College,

taxpayer may not like paying for criminals’ lunches, but beans are cheaper than metal detectors.

challenge the gang faces is to align members’ interests in such a way as to ensure that senior mobsters don’t have an incentive to pick on the junior ones. To do this, it has come up with a complex system of rules designed to make sure that no member has an interest in exploiting another—and that if he does, he will be held accountable.

City police arrested two federal cops found shooting up a bar; federal police broke up a kidnapping ring and discovered a city policeman among its members; and the army arrested a group of city officers for carrying illegal weapons, at which point the rest of the force announced that it didn’t want to go on patrol any more, for fear of being arrested

An absurd pattern established itself in which shootouts would take place between the two different sets of police patrolling Juárez. Each side would claim that the other was in cahoots with one of the warring cartels—and both would often be proven correct

Red traffic lights are a favorite place for hit men to assassinate their targets, so having a few feet between you and the car in front could be the difference between escaping and being hemmed in.

Governments are approaching the cocaine market as if it were the chocolate market, in which a rise in the price of cocoa beans leads to a corresponding rise in the price of chocolate bars. In reality, it is more like the art market, in which the tiny cost of the raw materials is insignificant compared with the high price of the finished product

simple agricultural product, which costs no more than coffee at its source, is worth more than its weight in gold by the time it arrives in Europe or the United States

Based on price data from Colombia obtained by Gallego and Rico, that would cost about $385. Once this is converted into a kilo of cocaine, it can sell in Colombia for $800. According to figures pulled together by Beau Kilmer and Peter Reuter at the RAND Corporation, an American think tank, that same kilo is worth $2,200 by the time it is exported from Colombia, and it has climbed to $14,500 by the time it is imported to the United States. After being transferred to a midlevel dealer, its price climbs to $19,500. Finally, it is sold by street-level dealers for $78,000.10