Review: Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel

Wainwright skirts the topic throughout the book, but when he finally gets to the conclusion, it seems like it is just a formality: we need to fix the demand-side of the criminal drug industry in order to make any meaningful progress. He does this by laying out how drugs get from the Andean mountainside to the concrete jungle street corners and explaining the economics of each step in the process.

The book is kind of like one long Freakonomics podcast: here is a story of cocaine farmers, here is the story of an American heroin addict, and here is a story of why New Zealand has the best party drugs and so on. This is good! And every story has the subtext beneath it. When discussing government efforts to destroy the different plants that go into drugs, Wainwright points out that cartels act like monoposonies- like Walmart- and they push the new cost of government interference onto suppliers. This is a pattern we see throughout the book: here is an area of the drugs trade, here is what government is doing to limit supply, and oh look it doesn't matter.

Many of America's problems (illegal immigration, gang violence, racial disparities in imprisonment, and the heroin epidemic) can all be solved by comprehensive drug reform. Unfortunately, Wainwright doesn't give the public much advice on where to go.

Bernie 2020.