Francisco E. Thoumi

My academic training was within the cannons of the market economy. For the two decades following the completion of my doctorade I worked in the research departments of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). In the mid-1980s I was the head of the international economics section and later of the industrial development and trade section of the IDB's department of economic studies.There I found it imposible to explain two key facts related to illegal drugs in Colombia using only the instruments of economics. First, why was it that despite the extraordinary profitatability of cocaine, Colombia had far fewer competitors in the international markets of cocaine than in those of any other of the country's exports. Second, why was it that the Colombians' participation in the illegal drug industry generated a violence much higher than in other countries, like Bolivia, Peru, Afghanistan, Thailand Myanmar, Laos, etc., where the profits in the illegal drug markets were similar relative to their GNP than in Colombia.

These unknowns made me change the focus of my research from the legal industrial development and international trade to the illegal ones. To do this, I had to tresspass my training in economics, and look for what history, sociology, law, psichology public policy, and other academic disciplines had to say about illegal psichoactive drug markets.

My currrent approach is based on the fact that the policy problems related to psichoactive drug production, marketing (trafficking) and human have become increasingly complex, and do not have unique or direct causes. Thus, simple policies such as the prohibition of all "non'medical or scientific" uses, or "legalization of all drugs" without understnading the historical and institutional frameworks of the societies where they would be applied, do not solve the "drug problems" that societies face.