Maritime transportation of illegal drugs from South America

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Author
Atkinson, Michael P.
Kress, Moshe
Szechtman, Roberto
Date
2017Metadata
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Background: The US invests considerable effort in searching and interdicting drug-trafficking vessels in
the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific regions. While some vessels are indeed interdicted, resulting in
confiscation of substantial quantities of drugs, many such vessels manage to avoid detection and arrive
safely at their destinations in Central America and Mexico with their drug load intact. The agency in
charge of interdicting this traffic, Joint Interagency Task Force South—JIATF-S, sends out both aerial and
surface assets for search and interdiction missions.
Methods: An important parameter for planning search and interdiction missions is an estimate of the
expected steady-state number of the various types of drug trafficking vessels present in the search
regions at any given time. In this paper we use various publicly available sources to estimate these
numbers.
Results: We estimate that the number of drug shipments initiated per month ranges between four and six
dozen, and at any given time there are between two and four vessels, of all types, on the high seas. These
estimates remain quite robust over a relatively large range of assumptions and estimates regarding the
size and distribution of the drug flow, mix of vessel types, and physical characteristics of those vessels.
Conclusion: Our analysis provides insight for how to allocate assets to search, detect, and interdict drug
trafficking vessels. The results can also be useful to vet informants to check if their information is
consistent with our flow estimates. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time such flow estimates appear in the open literature.
Description
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.07.010
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
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