Peter Reuter
Biographic Data
| ID | 301290 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Reuter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Reuter |
| SIGNATURE | REUTER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5039-2020 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 90 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 163 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 88 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1953 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Improving Opioid Use Estimates Through Multiple Data Sources
Public health orientation of Cannabis and alcohol regulators
Introduction to special section on precursor control
Possible effects of cheap fentanyl on drug markets, use, and harm
How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work
A Model to Assess the Feasibility of 911 Call Diversion Programs
Reforms to deploy civilian responders to non-criminal emergency calls may reduce demands on police departments and reduce negative interactions between police and civilians, but there is presently little empirical evidence on the feasibility of these proposals. We develop a model to evaluate which calls could be transitioned to civilian responders based on their crime risk. We use a rich dataset of community-initiated emergency calls to Baltimore…
The Baltic and Nordic responses to the first Taliban poppy ban
The 2000-2001 and the 2022-2023 Taliban opium bans were and could be two of the largest ever disruptions to a major illegal drug market. To help understand potential implications of the current ban for Europe, this paper analyzes how opioid markets in seven Baltic and Nordic countries responded to the earlier ban, using literature review, key informant interviews, and secondary data analysis. The seven nations' markets responded in diverse ways, …
Diverting 911 calls
Research Summary Two perceptions drive interest in finding ways of diverting more 911 calls from police to civilian first responders: (1) police responses can result in inadvertent harm to citizens and (2) many calls to which police respond require services that police often cannot provide. Thus, using other personnel may improve police–citizen relations and strengthen crime fighting by reducing extraneous police burden. Using a case study design…
Is the Sinaloa Cartel a Mafia
Aiming to reduce the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the topic of organized crime, this study assesses the extent to which the Sinaloa Cartel, the most prominent Mexican drug syndicate, has the characteristics of a mafia. The study uses Paoli’s 2020 mafia framework, which identifies seven typifying characteristics of mafias, such as the Sicilian Cosa Nostra or the Japanese Yakuza. It relies on a broad review of the literature, court transcripts …
A detailed study of a prominent dark web fentanyl trafficking organization
Overdose deaths in North America have soared, primarily because of the spread of illegally manufactured fentanyl.This paper uses detailed qualitative and transaction-level data to analyse an early and prominent dark web fentanyl-selling operation.The data record the date, drug, quantity, and selling price for 5,589 transactions comprising 872,659 items sold for a little over $2.8 million through AlphaBay.Findings include that the organisation sus…
National Assessments of Money Laundering Risks
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) requires national governments to demonstrate an understanding of the money laundering risks in the country. Such an understanding is the foundation for effective control of money laundering under the risk-based approach the FATF calls for. The authors analyzed the National Risk Assessments (NRAs) published by eight systemically important countries to test whether they demonstrate that basic understanding and…
Introduction to special section on UK drug strategy
What are the implications of the steady 40 year rise in US fatal overdoses
How much demand for money laundering services does drug selling create? Identifying the key parameters
This model permits estimation of the scale of money laundering associated with a particular drug market. It suggests that there are limits on money laundering controls as a way of reducing drug supply - although money laundering investigations may still be an effective way to identify and investigate high-level drug traffickers
Imagining a fentanyl future
Toward a “Post-Legalization” Criminology for Cannabis
Cannabis control policies in a few countries have recently shifted from criminal prohibition-based regimes to legalization of use and supply. While cannabis’ newly emerging status of legality may suggest a coming “end” for criminology-based interest in the drug, these fundamental changes rather open a window to a new set of criminological research issues and questions, mostly focusing on cannabis use and related behaviors, and their relation to c…
Conflict Management in High-Stakes Illegal Drug Transactions
We draw from aspects of Black’s theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling transaction failures at the highest levels of the cocaine trade in the Netherlands. The results show tha…
Opioids and the Criminal Justice System
The traditional US heroin market has transformed into a broader illegal opioid market, dominated first by prescription opioids (PO) and now also by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids (FOSO). Understanding of opioid-use disorder (OUD) has also transformed from being seen as a driver of crime to a medical condition whose sufferers deserve treatment. This creates new challenges and opportunities for the criminal justice system (CJS). Addressing in…
Organized Crime
How Similar Are Modern Criminal Syndicates to Traditional Mafias
Five organizations exemplify organized crime organizations, or “mafias”: the American and Sicilian Cosa Nostras, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, Chinese triads, and Japanese yakuza. Newer syndicates have emerged that are often called organized crime organizations but most importantly differ from the exemplars. Drug trafficking syndicates in Colombia and Mexico are large, wealthy, and extraordinarily violent but have proven fragile in the face of aggre…
Supply control for illegal markets
Supply control approaches to drug problems focus on the production, distribution, and sale of illicit psychoactive substances, and include alternative development programmes in producer nations, control of precursor chemicals used to produce certain drugs (e.g. methamphetamines) interdiction at national borders, and the incarceration of drug dealers at all levels. There is no evidence that promoting alternative development as part of global drug …
Criminalization and decriminalization of drug possession
Research suggests that punishing drug users has some limitations as a major component of drug policy. An increasing number of countries and sub-national jurisdictions have therefore been reducing or eliminating criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use, on grounds both of proportionality and effectiveness-oriented policy. Most decriminalization or depenalization programmes involve the substitution of civil penal…
Illegal markets
Illegal drugs are commodities that are bought and sold in markets. Many farmers are engaged in small amounts of drug growing in the producing countries, but there are comparatively small numbers of refiners, smugglers, and top-level importers. Compared to most legal markets, there are many sellers relative to the number of buyers in drug markets. One consequence of the network character of drug distribution is its resilience. Eliminating individu…
Narcotics and Drug Abuse
Fifty years ago, the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice saw drugs as a modest but growing problem for the criminal justice system. The reemergence of heroin occupied the Commission's attention. Many recommendations are admirable, such as a focus on public health interventions and a concern about the appropriateness of criminal prohibitions on marijuana use. Throughout the past 50 years, the problem has bo…
Drug War Heresies
This book provides the first multidisciplinary and nonpartisan analysis of how the United States should decide on the legal status of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It draws on data about the experiences of Western European nations with less punitive drug policies as well as new analyses of America's experience with legal cocaine and heroin a century ago, and of America's efforts to regulate gambling, prostitution, alcohol and cigarettes. It offe…
Risks and Prices
Marijuana and cocaine, two mass-market drugs, have been the object of a major campaign by the federal government over the past five years. That campaign apparently has not led to a significant tightening in the availability of the two drugs, though the relatively high prices of these drugs historically are a consequence of enforcement. The reason for this lack of response to recent law enforcement pressures may lie in structural characteristics o…
Chasing Dirty Money
National and international efforts to reduce money laundering were originally developed to reduce drug trafficking and have broadened over the years to address many other crimes and, most recently, terrorism. They now constitute a formidable regime applied to financial and nonfinancial institutions and transactions throughout much of the world. In this study, the authors (1) explore what is known about the scale and characteristics of money laund…
How Drug Enforcement Affects Drug Prices
Enforcement against drug selling remains the principal tool of drug control in the United States and many other countries. Though the risk of incarceration for a drug dealer has risen fivefold or more over the last 25 years in the United States, the prices of cocaine and heroin have fallen substantially. Different models of how enforcement affects drug supply may help explain the paradox. There are substantial periods in which drug markets are no…
Economists’ Contribution to the Study of Crime and the Criminal Justice System
Economists’ contributions to criminal justice research can be divided into three main areas of theory, technique, and substantive expertise. Economists’ work on perceptual deterrence, with its emphasis on the centrality of time discounting, has already been incorporated into criminological research. There has been a much more mixed record in taking up economic approaches to criminal justice theory: early work on prosecutors has been neglected, wh…
How Similar Are Modern Criminal Syndicates to Traditional Mafias
Five organizations exemplify organized crime organizations, or “mafias”: the American and Sicilian Cosa Nostras, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, Chinese triads, and Japanese yakuza. Newer syndicates have emerged that are often called organized crime organizations but most importantly differ from the exemplars. Drug trafficking syndicates in Colombia and Mexico are large, wealthy, and extraordinarily violent but have proven fragile in the face of aggre…
Money Laundering
Techniques for hiding proceeds of crime include transporting cash out of the country, purchasing businesses through which funds can be channeled, buying easily transportable valuables, transfer pricing, and using “underground banks.” Since the mid‐1980s, governments and law enforcement have developed an increasingly global, intrusive, and routinized set of measures to affect criminal revenues passing through the financial system. Except at an ane…
Can Drug Courts Help to Reduce Prison and Jail Populations
Drug courts have been widely praised as an important tool for reducing prison and jail populations by diverting drug-involved offenders into treatment rather than incarceration. Yet only a small share of offenders presenting with drug abuse or dependence are processed in drug courts. This study uses inmate self-report surveys from 2002 and 2004 to examine characteristics of the prison and jail populations in the United States and assess why so ma…
Why Has US Drug Policy Changed So Little over 30 Years
Though almost universally criticized as overly punitive, expensive, racially disparate in impact, and ineffective, American drug policy remained largely unchanged from 1980 to 2010. Marijuana is an important exception: policy and law underwent many changes, with the strong likelihood of more, involving increased legal access to the drug, in the near future. For cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine there has been an almost relentless increase in t…
Good Markets Make Bad Neighbors
Assessing Drug Prohibition and Its Alternatives
For decades, the debate over the merits of ending drug prohibition has carried on with little consequence. The recent near success of a cannabis legalization initiative in California suggests that citizens and politicians alike are more receptive to calls for change. We review basic research on deterrence and prices as well as emerging evidence on the potential empirical consequences of various alternatives to full prohibition, including depenali…
Dealing with Drugs
How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work
Opioids and the Criminal Justice System
The traditional US heroin market has transformed into a broader illegal opioid market, dominated first by prescription opioids (PO) and now also by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids (FOSO). Understanding of opioid-use disorder (OUD) has also transformed from being seen as a driver of crime to a medical condition whose sufferers deserve treatment. This creates new challenges and opportunities for the criminal justice system (CJS). Addressing in…
Smuggling wildlife in the Americas
International wildlife trafficking has garnered increased attention in recent years with a focus on the illicit trade in ivory, rhinos, and other animals from Africa and Asia. Less is known about trafficking in the Americas. By conducting a systematic review of academic literature, popular accounts, and government reports, this case study attempts to identify the scope and methods of wildlife trafficking in the Americas and its connections to org…
On the Multiple Sources of Violence in Drug Markets
Deterrence, Economics, and the Context of Drug Markets
Police Regulation of Illegal Gambling
This article examines problems presented to the police by their gambling enforcement responsibilities during the four decades following Prohibition's repeal. In this period repeated gambling corruption scandals put the police in disrepute. These scandals accurately reflected the underlying corruption of an effort that was essentially symbolic and not supported by a significant element of the otherwise law-abiding population. The fundamental sourc…
Narcotics and Drug Abuse
Fifty years ago, the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice saw drugs as a modest but growing problem for the criminal justice system. The reemergence of heroin occupied the Commission's attention. Many recommendations are admirable, such as a focus on public health interventions and a concern about the appropriateness of criminal prohibitions on marijuana use. Throughout the past 50 years, the problem has bo…
What Can Be Learned from Cross-National Comparisons of Data on Illegal Drugs
There has been relatively little effort at cross-national analysis of data concerning drug policy, though there is growing variation in how nations deal with illegal drugs. Systematic accounts of barriers to, and opportunities for, making comparisons are scarce. Comparisons of drug use prevalence, the focus of most cross-national studies, are undermined by fundamental and unacknowledged methodological differences. Prevalence is a poor measure of …
Assessing UK drug policy from a crime control perspective
Over the entire last quarter of the 20th century the British drug problem worsened, despite the implementation of a variety of approaches and commitment of substantial criminal justice and other resources. The link between chronic use of expensive drugs and property crime makes this experience important for understanding trends in crime and justice in Britain. The worsening of the problem can be seen in the growing number of new heroin users each…
Redefining the goals of national drug policy
This paper discusses what the goals of national drug policy have been and suggests an alternative set of goals. The past emphasis on use reduction is found wanting. Total harm related to drugs can be viewed as the product of use and harm per use. Thus, reducing use usually serves to reduce harm. However, in some cases, use reduction programs may increase harm per use so much that they increase overall harm even as they succeed in reducing use. He…
Conflict Management in High-Stakes Illegal Drug Transactions
We draw from aspects of Black’s theory of conflict management to (1) provide a description of the types of disputes occurring at the highest levels of the drug trade and (2) examine whether conflicts that end in violence differed from those that found a peaceful resolution. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyse 33 incidents of smuggling transaction failures at the highest levels of the cocaine trade in the Netherlands. The results show tha…
Welfare Receipt and Substance-Abuse Treatment Among Low-Income Mothers
Objectives. We explored changing relations between substance use, welfare receipt, and substance-abuse treatment among low-income mothers before and after welfare reform. Methods. We examined annual data from mothers aged 18 to 49 years in the 1990–2001 National Household Survey of Drug Abuse and the 2002 National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Logistic regression was used to examine determinants of treatment receipt. Results. Among low-income, s…
The social costs of the demand for quantification
Diverting 911 calls
Research Summary Two perceptions drive interest in finding ways of diverting more 911 calls from police to civilian first responders: (1) police responses can result in inadvertent harm to citizens and (2) many calls to which police respond require services that police often cannot provide. Thus, using other personnel may improve police–citizen relations and strengthen crime fighting by reducing extraneous police burden. Using a case study design…
Federal Estate and Gift Taxation. Cases and Materials
Easy Sport
This paper is an analysis of the Final Report of the Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling. After discussing the origins and political environment of the Commission, the paper focuses on the relationship between the Commission's recommendations and the results of its own research. The author argues that the research was used only where it fitted the Commission's views and was ignored where it did not. The paper concludes…
Regulating Business
Journal Article Regulating Business: Law And Consumer Agencies Get access Regulating Business: Law and Consumer Agencies. By Ross Cranston, London: Macmillan, 1979. Pp. 186. Peter Reuter Peter Reuter *Seminar Research Fellow, Center for Research on Institutions and Social Policy, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 30, Issue 1, Winter 1982, Pages 158–159…
Illegal gambling and organized crime
Disorganized Crime
Police Regulation of Illegal Gambling
This article examines problems presented to the police by their gambling enforcement responsibilities during the four decades following Prohibition's repeal. In this period repeated gambling corruption scandals put the police in disrepute. These scandals accurately reflected the underlying corruption of an effort that was essentially symbolic and not supported by a significant element of the otherwise law-abiding population. The fundamental sourc…
In the Underworld
The Social Costs of the Demand for Quantification
American Violence and Public Policy
The social costs of the demand for quantification
Risks and Prices
Marijuana and cocaine, two mass-market drugs, have been the object of a major campaign by the federal government over the past five years. That campaign apparently has not led to a significant tightening in the availability of the two drugs, though the relatively high prices of these drugs historically are a consequence of enforcement. The reason for this lack of response to recent law enforcement pressures may lie in structural characteristics o…
Testing and Deterrence
Dealing with Drugs
The Limits and Consequences of U.S. Foreign Drug Control Efforts
Efforts to reduce cocaine production and exports from the Andean region continue to be an important component of U.S. drug control efforts. This article presents a simple economic analysis of the effects of major source-country control programs: eradication, crop substitution, and refinery destruction. When account is taken of the structure of prices in the cocaine industry and the ability of farmers and refiners to make behavioral adaptations, n…
Quest for Integrity
The Flow of drugs from Mexico to the United States has been a source of trouble in US-Mexican relations for at least two decades. The dominant view in Mexico is that the problem arises from the inability of the United States to control its domestic demand for heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. The dominant US view has been that the Mexican government has failed to make effective efforts to control the supply of drugs. At times - in particular after …
The Cartage Industry in New York
The private garbage collection industry, dominated until recently by numerous very small firms in essentially local markets, has a long history of customer allocation conspiracies in restraint of trade. In New York metropolitan areas, these agreements have involved members of the Mafia. The reputation for racketeering involvement in the New York region has restricted entry, particularly by the few large national firms; maintained discipline among…
Against Excess
Part 1 Preliminaries: introduction - how to stop losing the war on drugs - thinking about drug policy. Part 2 Problems: drug abuse and other bad habits, the other victims of drug abuse. Part 3 Policies: laws, the markets for illicit drugs, enforcement, persuasion, help, and control. Part 4 Drugs: alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, heroin. Part 5 Recapitulation and conclusion: against excess - drug policy in moderation
Lessons from the absence of harm reduction in American drug policy
Even among its supporters, the American drug control strategy provides few grounds for enthusiasm. Despite many indications that the prevalence of drug use has declined over the past decade, in many ways the severity of the drug problem has remained fairly constant.1 Moreover, our current mix of policies is expensive, intrusive, and may actually contribute to drug related harm.2 Thus there is considerable interest - as documented by a steady stre…
Crack and the Evolution of Anti-Drug Policy
Redefining the goals of national drug policy
This paper discusses what the goals of national drug policy have been and suggests an alternative set of goals. The past emphasis on use reduction is found wanting. Total harm related to drugs can be viewed as the product of use and harm per use. Thus, reducing use usually serves to reduce harm. However, in some cases, use reduction programs may increase harm per use so much that they increase overall harm even as they succeed in reducing use. He…
Assessing alternative drug control regimes
The debate over alternative regimes for currently illicit psychoactive substances focuses on polar alternatives: harsh prohibition and sweeping legalization. This study presents an array of alternatives that lies between these extremes. The current debate lacks an explicit and inclusive framework for making comparative judgments. In this study, we sketch out such a framework, as a reminder of possible policy levers and their costs and benefits th…
Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising
What Price Data Tell Us about Drug Markets
This paper reviews empirical evidence on drug prices and discusses implications for understanding of drug markets and for policy. The most striking characteristics of drug prices are their high levels and extreme variability over time and space. High prices deter consumption but have ambiguous effects on drug-related crime. The consequences of the variability are largely unexplored and are difficult to determine. Conclusions are mixed with respec…
World drug report
World drug report
Political science (56 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (45 works) · Business (44 works) · Law (44 works) · Economics (36 works) · Medicine (34 works) · Criminology (32 works) · Drug (30 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Law (28 works)