Download Illicit drug markets as complex adaptive systems

Illicit Drug Markets as Complex Adaptive Systems
Lee Hoffer, Georgiy Bobaschev, and Robert (Joey) Morris
An effective method for researching illicit drug markets has been ethnography.
Ethnographic methods are successful because they focus on the interactive relationships
between dealers and customers situated within the social, political, economic and historic
contexts in which relationships occur. But ethnography has limitations: namely, findings
are difficult to quantify, replicate, or compare. This presentation discusses synthesizing
ethnographic research and agent-based modeling (ABM) techniques to better understand
the operation, organization, and structure of a local heroin market. An eighteen-month
ethnographic case-study conducted with a street-based heroin dealing network in Denver
revealed how a local open-air drug market was transformed by private sector, lawenforcement and Parks Department efforts. To extend explanatory models concerning
how this market adapted, a computational simulation incorporating dynamic interactions
was constructed using this dataset. The authors programmed the behaviors of customers,
private dealers, street-sellers, brokers, and the police to reflect core elements of the
market’s operation. After evaluating the logical consistency between the ethnographic
data and agent behaviors, the simulation was scaled-up to reveal aggregate outcomes and
patterns of behavior. Experimental findings substantiated the importance of sales
intermediaries in the market’s resiliency and ability to cope with police intervention.
While this project is experimental, the methodology it represents provides an innovative
way to research complex adaptive systems, and is specifically relevant to the dynamic
and adaptive nature of illicit drug markets. Extensions of this project, as well as its
strengths and limitations, will be discussed.