Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel [Paperback]

Picking his way through Andean cocaine fields, Central American prisons, Colorado pot shops, and the online drug dens of the Dark Web, Tom Wainwright provides a “a lively and engaging book, informed by both dogged reporting and gleanings from academic research” (The Washington Post)

How does a budding cartel boss succeed (and survive) in the $300 billion illegal drug business? By learning from the best, of course. From creating brand value to fine-tuning customer service, the folks running cartels have been attentive students of the strategy and tactics used by corporations such as Walmart, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola.
 
InNarconomics, Tom Wainwright is an intrepid guide to the most exotic and brutal industry on earth. Picking his way through Andean cocaine fields, Central American prisons, and communities where the cartels rule, Wainwright offers a vivid, fresh, and innovative look into the drug trade and its 250 million customers. More than just an investigation of how drug cartels do business,Narconomicsis also a keen and daring blueprint for how to defeat them.Tom Wainwrightis the media editor of theEconomist. Until 2013 he was the Mexico City bureau chief, covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as parts of South America and the United States border region. Wainwright has been a commentator on the drugs business on CNN, the BBC and NPR, among others. He has a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University. Wainwright lives in England.
 “[Tom Wainwright] brings a fine and balanced analytical mind to some very good research. By looking at the drug trade as a business, Wainwright is able to reveal much about why it wreaks such havoc in Central and South America. Wainwright show[s] how drug violence is not so much senseless but the devastating result of economic calculations taken to their brutal extreme. [His] conclusion is tls)