Popping the Balloon Effect: Assessing Drug Law Enforcement in Terms of Displacement, Diffusion, and the Containment Hypothesis

Abstract

The “balloon effect” is an often used but rather dismissive representation of the effects of drug law enforcement. It implies a hydraulic displacement model and an impervious illicit drug trade. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical developments in policing and crime prevention. Based on this, 10 types of displacement are identified and four arguments developed: (1) Displacement is less extensive and harmful than often contended; (2) Where displacement may occur it preferably should be exploited as a policy tool to delay the illicit drug industry and deflect it to less harmful locations and forms; (3) The opposite of displacement occurs, termed a diffusion of drug control benefits, wherein law enforcement has benefits that extend further than envisaged, and has 10 types mirroring those of displacement; (4) The net impact of drug law enforcement is often underestimated, and a containment hypothesis may offer a more accurate framework for evaluation.

Keywords :

• drug law enforcement
• displacement
• domino effect
• containment hypothesis
• diffusion of benefit
• disrupting connections
• adaptive response
• anticipatory benefits
• residual benefits

THE AUTHORS

James Windle, PhD (Loughborough University) is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of East London, UK. His main research interests are in the area of international drug policy and strategy. His doctoral work was an examination of the effectiveness of strategies to tackle illicit opium production in Asian countries. He has published on various areas of drug policy in journals including Crime, Law and Social Change, The Journal of Asian and African Studies, the Asian Journal of Criminology, and Crime, Law and Social History.

Graham Farrell, Ph.D. (Manchester University) is senior research fellow at the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He has worked at, inter alia, the United Nations, Rutgers University, the University of Oxford, and as deputy research director at the Police Foundation in Washington, DC. His research is mainly in the areas of environmental criminology, crime prevention, and policing. In relation to illicit drugs, this includes publications on prices and trafficking, supply reduction policy, alternative development, seizure interception rates, police crackdowns, drug offenders and criminal justice, demand reduction policy, and the Taliban crackdown on opium poppy in Afghanistan. He conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan in 2007 when evaluating progress in that country's criminal justice system.

Notes

1 The second author confesses to using the term “balloon effect” in the sense criticized here in Farrell (1998b), and the present study represents a development of thinking on the issue.

2 This is not to suggest that any Taliban tactics should be adopted.

3 Barr and Pease (1991) noted that a switch to legal activity is also a form of displacement, humorously illustrating this by noting that displacement from burglary to mowing the lawn would be a good thing.

4 For example, The Thai Government realized several drug, and nondrug, policy objectives by reducing illicit opium production to practically nil, regardless of whether production subsequently increased in a foreign nation (see Renard, 2001).

5 The interested reader is referred to Horst Rittel (1989) [Rittel, H., & Noble, D. (1989). Issue-based information systems for design (Working Paper 492). Berkeley, CA: The Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California] and to Heinz von Foerster (1960) [von Foerster, H., Mora, P.M., & Amiot, L. W. (1960). Doomsday; Friday, 13 November, A.D., 2026. Science, 132, 1291–1295] to consider the dimensions of both problems and questions. Rittel suggested that problems can and should be usefully categorized into two types: “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” The former are solved in a traditional known and tried “water fall paradigm”; gather data, analyze data, formulate solution, implement solution. The latter “wicked problems” can only be responded to individually, each time anew, with no ultimate, repeatable solution. von Foerster posited that there are two types of questions: legitimate questions and illegitimate questions. The former are those for which the answer is not known. A legitimate question is one for which the answer is known. Editor's note.

6 The reader is referred to Hills's criteria for causation which were developed in order to help/assist researchers and clinicians determine if risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated as a helpful perspective. [Hill, A. B. (1965). The environment and disease: associations or causation? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 58, 295–300]. Editor's note.