World Drug Report

The World Drug Report is a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime annual publication that analyzes market trends, compiling detailed statistics on drug markets.

Criticism

The report has now been criticized for its accuracy and the figures are said to be gross exaggerations of global market drug valuation. In their article, Measuring Global Drug Markets, Peter Reuter and Victoria Greenfield claim that the UNDCP overlooks factors like consumer-base (using numbers from a drug consumer base like the US, for heroin, to determine the flow and price, when in actuality they only constitute around 5% of the heroin globally, and at much higher prices than Southwest and Southeast Asia). Another fundamental problem with the drug data they cite is that it reflects not the “ trade flow but the estimate of turnover.” The article projects an estimated valuation number for global drug market to be at $20–25 billion annually which is a stark contrast to the UNDCP’s $500 billion.

In their book Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers In Global Grime and Conflict, Peter Andreas, Kelly M. Greenhill too argue that these figures may be, and in fact often are, distorted and manipulated. They write, “ Illicitness makes possible a politics of numbers.” Andreas and Kelly discuss how political actors may play with the numbers intentionally. They cite a few incentives for the inflation distortion and fabrication of numbers, one of the main ones being that the government or any NGO is viewed in a positive light, if it is seen as providing good security (high number of drug confiscations) to a big threat (the inflated number of drug trade).