WHEN POLICE SEIZE illegal drugs, they catch the bad guys who import and sell them and reduce the supply. This protects us all from drug dealers and traffickers and from the drugs themselves.

Simple, right?

It is often assumed that arresting suppliers and seizing drugs will deter people from engaging in drug distribution while raising prices and reducing supply in ways that lower consumption.

The research, however, paints a much less certain picture – so much so, that we should question why we invest so many resources in this potentially harmful practice.

All seizures great and small

Drug seizures come in all shapes and sizes. The largest, like the cocaine ‘mother ship’ seized near Cork in 2023, often happens as drugs are in transit between countries.

Seizures can also be quite small. Convictions in recent years for €10 and €4 of cannabis suggest that police and court resources are wasted on even the most trivial drug enforcement operations. Indeed, most seizures are small and relate to possession – not trafficking.

A large proportion of resources dedicated to responding to drugs flows through the police. A large proportion of police resources goes towards drugs. As such, we may expect strong evidence that the police’s actions reduce drug-related harms. It is it far from clear, however, that society benefits from greater drug seizures.

What effects do police seizures have on drug markets?

One issue is that disrupting drug markets can increase the violence associated with prohibition. A 2011 research review concluded that law enforcement actually increases violence, as arrests create opportunities for other people to fight over control of profitable black markets. Meanwhile, Gardaí have a specific ‘reporting programme’ for drug intimidation, but a 2014 study on the illicit drug markets in Ireland found that most such violence is related to debts that often rack up because of Garda seizures.

The overall picture does not indicate that police action clearly helps. As one 2020 review explains, we cannot ‘definitively conclude that arresting suppliers and seizing from suppliers will lead to desired outcomes such as reducing drug crime, drug use and other drug harms’, throwing further doubt on the merits of enforcement.

To understand why, we need to understand the scale and economics of drugs markets. Recently, Gardaí claimed that seizures increased wholesale cocaine prices. Yet, research does not suggest a close association between policing and drug prices. Rather, large seizures represent only a tiny proportion of overall supply, having at most a limited, localised, short-term effect on availability. In any case, price increases raise profits and motivate people to participate in the supply chain.

Moreover, the volume of drugs that is lost to seizures is reasonably predictable, meaning that this risk may be mostly priced in. For cocaine, recent UN estimates suggest that seizure volumes have risen faster than production since 2010 (p. 21), but the cultivation of coca bush has skyrocketed in that time. Meanwhile, its purity in Western and Central Europe has grown in line with seizures since 2015 (p. 47), allowing prices to remain relatively stable. Police often take credit when prices rise, but it is not actually obvious that they can meaningfully affect prices.

Danger for consumers

A related problem with police seizures is that they introduce a perverse incentive on suppliers to maximise product strength. Both a higher product purity and stronger alternatives (e.g., synthetic opioids instead of heroin) create more profit from lower volumes. They also endanger consumers, who don’t know how strong or adulterated a product is until it’s too late.

For example, in line with the historically strong MDMA in circulation internationally, the HSE has warned festival goers about the potency of MDMA in use at Electric Picnic, while hospitalisations at Portlaoise Prison were reportedly caused by a highly potent benzodiazepine not seen before in the community in Ireland. The HSE’s National Clinical Lead on addiction services stated that this reflects the volatility in drug markets – a volatility that will only increase as reduced Afghan opium production means synthetic opioids replace heroin in Europe.

Drug seizures can also disrupt local drug markets in ways that put people at risk. For example, an American study saw seizures double fatal overdoses locally, with two possible explanations: they cause a gap in use that decreases tolerance, or people seek new suppliers whose substances are less predictable to them.

All this begs the question: if drug seizures are not likely to reduce harm – and might even increase it – why do they play such a significant role in our response to drugs?

Drug seizures as PR

Almost every day, some kind of drug seizure features atop the news feeds. This week, RTÉ reported that ‘cannabis worth €500,000 [was] seized at Dublin Airport’. In another headline, ‘drugs worth €181,000’ were ‘seized in Louth’.

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Each article was accompanied by a photograph of the drugs in question. This is what sociologist Travis Linnemann calls the ‘police trophy shot’ – a visual representation of a successful ‘bust’, or what a police chief in The Wire refers to as ‘dope on the table’.

This is ‘symbolic policing’. Where our expectations of the police are so out of line with reality, they must at least be seen to be doing something – whether it prevents harm or not.

Even the police tend not to contest that they take engaging in public relations through the media seriously, or that drug seizures play an important role in this. Gardaí even won a prize last year for ‘Best Public Relations Event’ for an organised crime ‘media conference’.

It is difficult to assess how much weight police put on the PR opportunities associated with drug policing. There may be an underlying belief that drug policing has a social benefit, even if there is little evidence to support this. It is precisely because seizures are so rarely questioned as a tactic that we must raise awareness of the lack of supporting evidence.

Counting the costs of the war on drugs

Each study mentioned notes that it’s difficult to conduct scientific research on drug markets. Yet, as one article mentions, the social costs of enforcement are so high that more scrutiny is merited. Gardaí, too, are often put in harm’s way by our obsession with drug seizures.

As Ireland continues to invest substantial resources on drug policing, there’s a growing realisation among police in the UK that this might be a harmful waste of time and life. Police researchers are starting to consider what ‘harm reduction policing’ can look like. Certainly, this requires changes in drug laws, reinvesting resources, and a major shift in police culture.

The solution is not to give up on reducing drug harms, but to adopt an evidence-led policy in which the harms criminalisation causes are factored into calculations and harm reduction is prioritised. We need brave police and government leaders to question the criminalisation of drug supply.

Dr. Ian Marder is Assistant Professor in Criminology at Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology. In September 2023, he was invited to address the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use, where he discussed restorative responses to drugs and criminalisation-related harms.