The Harms of Cocaine Trafficking

Seeking to fill a substantial gap in analytical infrastructure, this article lays out a summary of a newly developed framework for systematically assessing the harms of criminal activities and presents findings from an initial application to cocaine trafficking in Belgium. The application is based on a substantial data collection, which included an analysis of records in the Organized Crime Database of the Belgian Federal Police, 52 criminal proceedings, and interviews with 18 experts, and 12 convicted traffickers. First, we construct a business model for cocaine trafficking in Belgium to characterize the key operational phases and “accompanying” and “enabled” activities. On this basis, we identify the possible harms associated with cocaine trafficking and related activities, evaluate the severity and incidence of those harms, prioritize the harms, and establish their causality. The application demonstrates the merits of the approach and the conceptual and technical challenges confronting it.