We interviewed a purposive sample of high-level cocaine smugglers in federal prisons. We were especially interested in learning how smugglers assess risk and how these factors vary by method and role of smuggler. We conclude from our interviews with smugglers that the biggest deterrents are:

• Threat of informants, whether cooperating defendants or confidential informants
• Prison terms of 25 years or greater
• Ability to be prosecuted under dry conspiracy charges (i.e., they need not be caught in possession of the drug to be convicted)

We also found that smugglers don't perceive much of a threat on the water because they believe that law enforcement lacks the necessary assets to spot them. If spotted, they are certain law enforcement can't catch them, and if caught, the use of sophisticated compartments makes it virtually impossible for the drugs to be located. This supports a need for enhanced interdiction capability in the water.

In terms of sentences (if caught) smugglers expect a sentence of 10 years. But 25 years to life is more realistic under current sentencing guidelines (for high-level smugglers). The prospect of facing 25 years in prison was adequate to deter 100 percent of those interviewed. This begs the question of why the U.S. is not making sentencing guidelines more widely known in the smuggling community. Smugglers acknowledged in our interviews that they stay abreast of drug enforcement activities through local newspapers in their home countries. Accordingly, publishing U.S. sentencing guidelines in Colombian and Mexican newspapers could be an inexpensive method of deterrence. At one point, U.S. Customs had considered placing billboards at U.S. ports of entry displaying the penalties for smuggling drugs into the United States. Given what we learned in our interviews with drug smugglers, this may be worth reconsidering. Also, it would seem that cultivating more confidential informants via investigative operations—and making it known that this is a key component of our counterdrug strategy—would be an effective deterrent.

Summary of Statistical Analysis of Counterdrug Enforcement Operations

The following table summarizes our quantitative assessment of the impact of counterdrug enforcement on two main outcomes: effect on cocaine prices in the U.S. and effect on displacing drug trafficking activity from one transportation route and method to another.

Summary— Effect of Deterrent Events on Cocaine Prices and Trafficker Behavior
	Increase Cocaine Prices	Alter Trafficker Behavior
Arrival & Transit Zone Operations
Hard Line Zorro II Gateway White Shark I White Shark II Frontier Shield Border/Gulf Shield White Shark III Brass Ring River Sweep Frontier Lance Conjuntos I Conjuntos II Two Dozen	Yes No No No No No Yes No No No No No Yes No	Yes N/A Yes No No No Yes Yes No Yes No No No Yes
Source Zone Operations
Support Justice III Support Justice IV Stand-down Shoot-down	Yes Yes No Yes	N/A N/A N/A N/A
Trafficker Arrests/Deaths
Arrests/Deaths Orejuela Brothers Arrest	Yes Yes	N/A N/A
Based on these analyses, source zone interdiction operations and the arrest or death of major drug traffickers appear to have very significant effects on increasing cocaine prices in the U.S. The impact of the source zone interdiction operations is likely due to success in temporarily reducing the supply of cocaine to the United States. Since cocaine prices are expressed in terms of price per pure gram, the increase in prices (particularly at retail level) are the result of increased ‘cutting’ by the dealers. This would be a fairly quick and obvious way to deal with a temporary shortage in supply.

The positive effect of operations Hard Line, Border/Gulf Shield and Conjuntos II on cocaine prices implies that these operations had a very real impact as well and either caused traffickers to increase their fees and/or reduced the supply of cocaine to U.S. markets.

Although the remaining transit and arrival zone interdiction operations examined do not have a statistically significant impact on cocaine prices in the U.S., many exhibit an impact on trafficker behavior. This suggests that these operations were effective enough to force smugglers to change their transportation routes and/or methods. However, as the counterdrug community has long recognized, drug traffickers’ ability to get drugs from South America into the U.S. is limited only by their creativity. Accordingly, it appears the ability of these operations to impact cocaine prices was ameliorated by the availability of alternative transportation routes/methods.

Recommendations for Further Research

This report does not provide the final word on the effectiveness of counterdrug operations. Indeed, we were disappointed with and often perplexed about the lack of data available on the activities of interdiction assets. This was most notably the case with the interdiction activities of the Department of Defense. Ironically, better data was available on what drug traffickers were doing than on the activities of U.S. drug interdiction assets. Without the requisite data, no statistical procedures, no matter how sophisticated, can provide compelling arguments about the effectiveness of interdiction programs.

We have developed methods to evaluate program effectiveness, and this report makes recommendations for how those methods could be employed in future studies. Still, serious program evaluations will require:

Greater cooperation from all federal agencies involved in drug enforcement operations. Our statistical analysis uncovered a high degree of interaction among the operations considered in our models. That is, the impact of an operation is quite different when examined in the context of other operations or activities occurring at or around the same time. The models’ ability to accurately identify the impact of specific operations would be improved with more comprehensive data on drug enforcement resource levels and activities.

Expanded Scope of Analysis. Our analyses in this study were based on cocaine movement data and price series. There is no reason, except for the limits imposed by time and funding, that an analyst could not go directly to the issue to see if drug enforcement operations affect consumption. Consumption is measured in surveys such as the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring survey. Because these are collected on a more or less continuous basis, they could provide another way of monitoring the ultimate effect of interdiction.

Improved Analysis. As this report shows, this study posed difficult analytic problems. We struggled to overcome many of them through considering multiple variations of outcome data, the introduction of control variables, and the application of sophisticated statistical techniques. We did not overcome them all. For example, one area that warrants further exploration is the creation of regional drug price series. STRIDE data tend to over-represent East Coast markets (particularly Washington, D.C.) Accordingly, the effect of operations such as Hard Line that target smuggling across the southwest border, are lost when examined against a price series constructed from the larger data set. By creating a regional price series for the southwest border, we were able to pick up an otherwise obscured impact of operation Hard Line on retail prices.

Improved Asset Data. Better interdiction asset data is critical for the modeling. Fluctuations in assets affects the ability to detect smugglers and hence the quality of data in the Consolidated Cocaine Data Base (CCDB)¹. Significant interdiction assets that contribute at each stage of the interdiction process (detection, pursuit, and capture), as well as area in which it operates and date of operation, must be collected.

Incorporate All Cocaine Movement Data. Follow-on work could consider all events in the CCDB, not just those used for Interagency Counterdrug Performance Assessment Working Group (ICPWG)² purposes. We were constrained to the ICPAWG events only for this study because of the time period under consideration (1990–1999). Using all cocaine movement events would provide more richness to the analysis.

Perform Analysis of a Regional "Cocaine System". Perform comprehensive analysis that considers—for a particular region—the effect of counterdrug operations on all aspects of the "cocaine system" including demand, prices, and cocaine movement into and out of the area. By narrowing the focus to one area, a more detailed model can be built that could then be extended to other areas.

Develop Predictive Models. Building on this work, develop models that will provide analysts the ability to predict smugglers’ responses to certain interdiction scenarios.

Include Significant Seizure Events. Future work should consider the deterrent effect of large seizures. This could easily be incorporated into the current model.

2 These data are a subset of the CCDB data and include those drug movements that were interdicted en-route to their destination.

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