Calibrating Law Enforcement and Its Purpose

In “Calibrating Law Enforcement and Its Purpose,” published by Addiction on November 10, 2014, Vanda Felbab-Brown comments on Harold Pollack and Peter Reuter’s article “Does tougher enforcement make drugs more expensive?”(Addiction, March 2014). Pollack and Reuter find that the street price of drugs has largely been unaffected by drug law-enforcement policies and question the value of stringent enforcement. Felbab-Brown connects this finding to her own research on crop eradication efforts, in which she has argued that eradication often creates highly undesirable effects in supply countries, such as intensifying insurgencies and violent conflict, strengthening the bonds between insurgents and local populations and increasing human rights violations, but fails to bankrupt militant groups that profit from drugs. Afghanistan provides one salient example of such negative outcomes.