The balloon effect is a criticism of United States drug policy. The name draws an analogy between efforts to eradicate the production of illegal drugs in South American countries and squeezing a balloon: If a balloon is squeezed the air is moved, but does not disappear, instead moving into another area of less resistance.[1]

Examples

Examples of this displacement in drug traffic include:

As described in The Economist:

Drug-policy geeks call this the "balloon effect": pushing down on drug production in one region causes it to bulge somewhere else. Latin Americans have a better phrase: the efecto cucaracha, or cockroach effect. You can chase the pests out of one corner of your house, but they have an irritating habit of popping up somewhere else.[3]

Brazil and the Southern Cone (Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina) neglected their respective drug trafficking issues and due to the concentration on the Andean region, these were neglected by the United States as well. These nations ignored the problem primarily due to its slow introduction and penetration into their society, the insistence from the U.S. that the sources of the drugs was the only problem and because the governments at the time were more concerned with foreign debt, inflation, economic growth, civil-military relations and political survival.[1] The United States continued to increase their anti-drug operations in the Andean region resulting in displacement.[4] This means that the U.S. tactics forced the drug traffickers to search for safer areas with less government pressure to eliminate the flow of narcotics. The drug traffickers took advantage of the neglected Southern Cone and began shifting their routes, locations for cocaine laboratories and money laundering centres. These shifts have also created growing drug consumption issues among the Southern Cone countries. While the role of the Southern Cone had been that of a transhipment point for cocaine produced in the Andean region, further evidence appeared to indicate that in fact since 1984 the region had been used extensively by Colombian and Bolivian drug traffickers.[4] Cocaine labs were found in Northern and Western Brazil and in Argentina. It was also found that Uruguay and Chile had become major financial centres for money laundering after the invasion of Panama.[1] Uruguay was particularly attractive as it has one of the most open banking systems in the Western hemisphere and the government has always put great emphasis on having tight bank secrecy laws.[4]

Other contexts

  • This also describes the offsetting behavior in health care when costs shift from hospital care to home care.
  • A software development colloquialism, it is often used to describe the effect of fixing a bug or problem in one area of the system, where the fix itself then causes another problem to occur; fixing this subsequent issue then results in further problems, ad infinitum.
  • This term is also used in business to describe situations were changes made in one area of a business lead to unforeseen and adverse effects in other parts of a business.

See also

References

Footnotes
  1. 1 2 3 Mora, Frank O. "Victims of the Balloon Effect: Drug Trafficking and the U.S. Policy in Brazil and the Southern Cone of Latin America". The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies 21.2 (1996): 115–22. York University Libraries. 22 Oct. 2011.
  2. ↑ "Stopping it, How Government Try--And Fail--to Stem the Flow of Drugs". The Economist. 26 July 2001. The main targets of American supply-reduction campaigns over the years have been Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The net effect appears to have been a relocation and reorganisation of production, not a cutback. Dramatic falls in coca cultivation in Peru and Bolivia in the late 1990s coincided with an equally dramatic rise in Colombia, even though almost all the top people in Colombia's notorious Cali cartel had been jailed in the mid-1990s.
  3. ↑ T.W. (2013-04-03). "Why is less cocaine coming from Colombia?". The Economist. Retrieved 2017-04-26.
  4. 1 2 3 Friesendorf, Cornelius. "Squeezing the Balloon, United States Air Interdiction and the Restructuring of the Southern American Drug Industry in the 1990s". Crime, Law and Social Crime 44 (2005): 35–78. York University Libraries. Web. 22 Oct. 2011.
Sources
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