The Carolinas could be a hotspot for the trafficking and production of the drug Ecstasy, suggested a new study.

‘The Carolinas could be a hotspot for the trafficking and production of the drug Ecstasy, suggested a new study.’

“NDIC hasn’t highlighted the Carolinas as an area of activity but our price data suggest there’s a lot going on there,” he said. “Prices are probably one of the most important economic phenomena because they carry information about the movement of goods.”




Never before implemented to study drug-trafficking patterns, Chandra’s methodology is simple. Drugs are inferred to flow from the city with the lower price to the city with the higher price. If cities are connected as source and destination cities, drug prices will move in lockstep, growing more expensive as they leave cities of origin.
Other key findings:
• Canada has become a major exporting country of Ecstasy into the United States.
• Cities close to the U.S. - Canada border, such as Seattle, Detroit and Portland, have become major Ecstasy gateways and distribution centers.
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• The price of Ecstasy increases as it travels inland from the west and east coasts and the Canadian border.
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“While prices can be used to confirm some of what we already know and suspect, there are instances in which they can tell you things that perhaps you weren’t thinking about,” he said. “The more information you bring to bear on a problem, the more facets of that problem you get to see.”
Chandra’s study is published in the journal Global Crime.
Source-Newswise