Peter Reuter

• University of Maryland, College Park

Research Summary Two perceptions drive interest in finding ways of diverting more 911 calls from police to civilian first responders: (1) police responses can result in inadvertent harm to citizens and (2) many calls to which police respond require services that police often cannot provide. Thus, using other personnel may improve police–citizen rel...

Estimating stocks and flows is an innovative first step

Aiming to reduce the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the topic of organized crime, this study assesses the extent to which the Sinaloa Cartel, the most prominent Mexican drug syndicate, has the characteristics of a mafia. The study uses Paoli’s 2020 mafia framework, which identifies seven typifying characteristics of mafias, such as the Sicilian C...

Reforms to deploy civilian responders to non-criminal emergency calls may reduce demands on police departments and negative interactions between police and civilians, but there is presently little empirical evidence on the feasibility of these proposals. We develop a model of emergency call risk to evaluate which calls could be transitioned to civi...

The spread of illegally manufactured opioids, including fentanyl, has brought unprecedented levels of drug overdose deaths in North America. In some markets, illegally manufactured fentanyl (IMF) is essentially displacing heroin, not just being used to adulterate it. It is not possible at this time to provide an accurate point estimate of the amoun...

Background: The illegal drug trade is often, and plausibly, asserted to be the largest illegal market, globally and in many individual countries. It is also claimed that a large share of its revenues is laundered, though there are no estimates of that volume. We provide rough estimates of that proportion and its primary determinants. Methods and...

Background and Aims Several randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conclude that heroin-assisted-treatment (HAT) has a larger benefit-cost ratio than oral methadone because HAT more reliably and substantially reduces participants’ criminal activity. This review: (1) summarizes results from RCTs about the comparative effectiveness of HAT for reducing c...

Background: Globally, heroin and other opioids account for more than half of deaths and years-of-life-lost due to drug use and comprise one of the four major markets for illegal drugs. Having sound estimates of the number of problematic heroin users is fundamental to formulating sound health and criminal justice policies. Researchers and policymak...

For nearly a century heroin has dominated the illegal opioid trade. The global supply of heroin is estimated to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenues a year and its illegal use has long been the source of many societal harms. The arrival of inexpensive and mass-produced synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, to parts of North America and E...

Cannabis control policies in a few countries have recently shifted from criminal prohibition-based regimes to legalization of use and supply. While cannabis’ newly emerging status of legality may suggest a coming “end” for criminology-based interest in the drug, these fundamental changes rather open a window to a new set of criminological research...

The traditional US heroin market has transformed into a broader illegal opioid market, dominated first by prescription opioids (PO) and now also by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids (FOSO). Understanding of opioid-use disorder (OUD) has also transformed from being seen as a driver of crime to a medical condition whose sufferers deserve treatment...

Background Overdose deaths related to illegal drugs in North American markets are now dominated by potent synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, a circumstance foreshadowed by often‐overlooked events in Estonia since the turn of the century. Market transitions generate important and far‐reaching implications for drug policy. Argument and analysis The...

We draw from aspects of Black's theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling tran...

Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice - edited by Gregory Shaffer July 2020

Cambridge Core - Socio-Legal Studies - Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice - edited by Gregory Shaffer

As US states move toward various forms of adult access to cannabis, there has been a great interest in measuring the impact of such changes on adolescent cannabis use. Two recent prominent analyses have used Monitoring the Future (MTF), a nationally representative survey of students, to examine the effects. We compared MTF data for California and f...

This Article inquires into the case of one of the most comprehensive, far-reaching, most deeply penetrating, and most punitive of TLOs: antimoney laundering. Drawing on an intensive study at a moment when its governing norms and methodologies of implementation were undergoing revision and expansion, as well as on observation and participation in AM...

The second edition of Drug Policy and the Public Good presents up‐to‐date evidence relating to the development of drug policy at local, national, and international levels. The book explores both illicit drug use and nonmedical use of prescription medications from a public health perspective. The core of the book is a critical review of the scientif...

The FATF requires each country to undertake a national risk assessment (NRA) to show the government’s knowledge of money laundering risks. There is little guidance as to how these NRAs are to be conducted, and those that have been published show great variation in terms of data used, analytical methods, and the depth of policy analysis. After expou...

Fifty years ago, the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice saw drugs as a modest but growing problem for the criminal justice system. The reemergence of heroin occupied the Commission's attention. Many recommendations are admirable, such as a focus on public health interventions and a concern about the appropr...

The Anti-Money Laundering regime has been important in harmonizing laws and institutions, and has received global political support. Yet there has been minimal effort at evaluation of how well any AML intervention does in achieving its goals. There are no credible estimates either of the total amount laundered (globally or nationally) nor of most o...

Background: There is significant interest in comparing countries on many different indicators of social problems and policies. Cross-national comparisons of drug prevalence and policies are often hampered by differences in the approach used to reach respondents and the methods used to obtain information in national surveys. The paper explores how...

Advances in chemistry, technology, and globalization have contributed to the rapid development and diffusion of NPS (Novel Psychoactive Substances), creating perhaps the most serious challenge to the century-old international drug control system and to national laws. Very little is known about the effects of these substances, which fall outside of...

Drug law enforcement (DLE) research has been poorly funded relative to drug treatment research. The literature is slight in volume and not yet very insightful. Taking the lack of funding to represent a chronic lack of public interest in the effects of DLE, the article offers a set of suggestions for how to create of a stronger DLE research communit...

Many judge the American criminal justice system to have largely failed in its drug enforcement role, and the justice system itself has suffered a loss of community support and internal morale as a consequence. Five principles should guide improvement of drug enforcement, including that drug enforcement be viewed as a preventive activity, whose main...

Advances in chemistry, technology, and globalization have contributed to the rapid development and diffusion of NPS (new psychoactive substances), creating perhaps the most serious challenge to the century-old international drug control system and to national systems. Very little is known about the effects of these substances which fall outside of...

This research, based primarily on financial records of Colombian money smugglers found by Dutch police investigators, describes the costs and operations of a segment of the high-level drug trade not previously documented in the scholarly literature. Cocaine traffickers pay brokers to move their revenues from the Netherlands to Colombia. The transfe...

Commentary to: Can new psychoactive substances be regulated effectively? An assessment of the British Psychoactive Substances Bill

The regulation of new psychoactive substances (NPS) has confounded governments throughout the western world. In 2014 the UK government convened an NPS Review Expert Panel to consider a range of approaches. Ultimately the Panel recommended that the government ban all new psychoactive drugs and allow only psychoactive substances specifically exempted...

International wildlife trafficking has garnered increased attention in recent years with a focus on the illicit trade in ivory, rhinos, and other animals from Africa and Asia. Less is known about trafficking in the Americas. By conducting a systematic review of academic literature, popular accounts, and government reports, this case study attempts...

Background: A central policy research question concerns the extent to which specific policies produce certain effects - and cross-national (or between state/province) comparisons appear to be an ideal way to answer such a question. This paper explores the current state of comparative policy analysis (CPA) with respect to alcohol and drugs policies...

There has been relatively little effort at cross-national analysis of data concerning drug policy, though there is growing variation in how nations deal with illegal drugs. Systematic accounts of barriers to, and opportunities for, making comparisons are scarce. Comparisons of drug use prevalence, the focus of most cross-national studies, are under...

Tobacco use has declined because of measures such as high taxes on tobacco products and bans on advertising, but worldwide there are still more than one billion people who regularly use tobacco, including many who purchase products illicitly. By contrast to many other commodities, taxes comprise a substantial portion of the retail price of cigarett...

AimsDrug policy strategies and discussions often use prevalence of drug use as a primary performance indicator. However, three other indicators are at least as relevant: the number of heavy users, total expenditures and total amount consumed. This paper stems from our efforts to develop annual estimates of these three measures for cocaine (includin...

AimsTo review empirical research that seeks to relate marginal increases in enforcement against the supply of illicit drugs to changes in drug prices at the level of the drug supply system being targeted. Method Review of empirical studies. FindingsAlthough the fact of prohibition itself raises prices far above those likely to pertain in legal mark...

This study finds that the IMF has contributed significantly to efforts that will improve the standards and methodology for assessing AML/CFT systems worldwide. The IMF has shown an openness to independent investigation of its practices; a willingness to ask baseline questions about the objectives and efficacy of AML/CFT regimes; a commitment to exp...

A sense of scale is a prerequisite to thinking sensibly about illicit drug markets. For example, knowing whether a country consumes tens, hundreds, or thousands of metric tons (MTs) of a prohibited substance is critical for understanding the impact of a three-MT seizure at a border crossing. But decisionmakers need more than a sense of scale; they...

The aim of the study is to generate a best estimate for the economic, financial and social costs of organised crime in and against the EU and to inform an evidence-based understanding of the associated issues. As so much uncertainty and known intra-EU and inter-crime variation exist, the study refrains from trying to create an aggregate figure for...

Though almost universally criticized as overly punitive, expensive, racially disparate in impact, and ineffective, American drug policy remained largely unchanged from 1980 to 2010. Marijuana is an important exception: policy and law underwent many changes, with the strong likelihood of more, involving increased legal access to the drug, in the nea...

The goals of tobacco control endgame strategies are specified in terms of the desired levels of tobacco use and/or tobacco related health consequences. Yet the strategies being considered may have other consequences beyond tobacco use prevalence, forms and related harms. Most of the proposed strategies threaten to create large black markets with po...

Drug courts have been widely praised as an important tool for reducing prison and jail populations by diverting drug-involved offenders into treatment rather than incarceration. Yet only a small share of offenders presenting with drug abuse or dependence are processed in drug courts. This study uses inmate self-report surveys from 2002 and 2004 to...

Illegal enterprises operate in settings of risk and uncertainty very different from those in legal businesses. Not only do the state and competitors threaten their transactions and assets but they cannot make use of written contracts, settle disputes through the civil courts or obtain information as readily as their legal counterparts. It is widely...

In 1998 the United Nations General Assembly Special Session resolved that governments would reduce drug production and consumption greatly within 10 years. With that period now elapsed, there is an interest in reviewing how successful this was and considering how drug policy could be improved. The demand for drugs in the world has stabilized mainly...

Arrest rates per capita for possession of marijuana have increased threefold over the last 20 years and now constitute the largest single arrest offense category. Despite the increase in arrest numbers, rates of use have remained stable during much of the same period. This article presents the first estimates of the arrest probabilities for marijua...

The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Public Policy offers a comprehensive examination of crimes as public policy subjects. Much of the scholarly literature and principal books on criminal justice and crime control policy take the operations of the criminal justice system, the causes of crime and delinquency, theories about crime and justice, and crime...

Discussions about reducing the harms associated with drug use and antidrug policies are often politicized, infused with questionable data, and unproductive. This article provides an overview of a nonpartisan primer that should be of interest to those who are new to the field of drug policy, as well as those who have been working in the trenches. It...

The article, based upon an extensive literature review, reconstructs and analyzes the parallel evolution of the international drug control regime and the world opiate market, assessing the impact of the former on the latter until the rise of present-day mass markets. It shows that, since its inception, the regime has focused almost entirely on matt...

In their manuscript, Corsaro, Hunt, Kroovand Hipple, and McGarrell (2012, this issue) provide a valuable contribution to the literature regarding focused deterrence with an econometric evaluation of the High Point Drug Market Intervention (DMI). By employing a difference-in-difference Poisson panel regression framework, as well as group-based traje...

Immigration enforcement is carried out by a complex legal and administrative system, operating under frequently changing legislative mandates and policy guidance, with authority and funding spread across several agencies in two executive departments and the courts. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for conducting immigra...

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 aimed to eliminate the illicit production and non-medical use of cannabis, cocaine, and opioids, an aim later extended to many pharmaceutical drugs. Over the past 50 years international drug treaties have neither prevented the globalisation of the illicit production and non-medical use of these drugs,...

For decades, the debate over the merits of ending drug prohibition has carried on with little consequence. The recent near success of a cannabis legalization initiative in California suggests that citizens and politicians alike are more receptive to calls for change. We review basic research on deterrence and prices as well as emerging evidence on...

Having a sense of the scale of an illicit drug market is important for projecting consequences of alternative policy regimes. In this article, we review two general approaches to drug market estimation – supply-side and demand-side – before turning to a more specific analysis of studies that measure the size of the U.S. marijuana market. The paper...

This chapter first describes the changing patterns of drug misuse in the United States over the last forty years, which is necessary to understand the challenge now facing the criminal justice system. It then reviews what is known about the effectiveness of drug treatment in reducing crime at the individual level, and discusses interventions aimed...

No modern jurisdiction has ever legalized commercial production, distribution and possession of cannabis for recreational purposes. This paper presents insights about the effect of legalization on production costs and consumption and highlights important design choices. Insights were uncovered through our analysis of recent legalization proposals i...

This paper examines the effectiveness of drug courts to reduce the size of the incarcerated drug-offending population using data from the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities and the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails. We find that very few of those entering state prison in 2004 or jail in 2002 would have been eligible for drug diversio...

In recent years a number of studies have attempted to rank drugs by a single measure of harmfulness as the basis for decisions about scheduling and classification. These efforts are fundamentally flawed, both conceptually and methodologically. The effort to provide a single measure masks the variety of non-comparable dimensions that are relevant, t...

In September 1989, amid an emotional and ideological debate regarding problematic drug use in the United States and the 'war on drugs', RAND's Drug Policy Research Center (DPRC) was created through private foundation funds. The purpose of this new research center was to provide objective empirical analysis on which to base sound drug policy. Twenty...

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Despite efforts to reduce drug consumption in the United States over the past 35 years, drugs are just as cheap and available as they have ever been. Cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines continue to cause great harm in the country, particularly in minority communities in the major cities. Marijuana use remains a part of adolescent development for...