May 14, 2020

Welcome to the Range Report, where I hope to expand your personal “search function,” providing opportunities to connect disparate ideas, alight on new interests, or just think about something you otherwise wouldn’t.

Today’s executive summary: People are starting to move again, but not enough for the drug trade.

PEOPLE ARE MOVING AGAIN, SLOWLY

When I last shared the link to the number of passengers going through TSA, it was consistently about 4% the volume-per-day compared to the previous year. That figure has started to rise, and now it’s hovering around 8%. That might sound small, but, obviously, it’s a 100% increase in just three weeks in total passengers going through TSA each day. Will we ever return to 2.5 million passengers per day? Warren Buffett, at least, thinks that we won’t see those travel numbers again in the next few years, which is why Berkshire Hathaway sold all of its shares in airlines. (Buffett’s company held around 10% of American, Delta, United, and Southwest.)

Data on the number of Apple Maps requests for directions also suggest the beginnings of a slow return to mobility. I found the Miami data particularly interesting. Much has been made of the fact that Florida did not implement blanket shutdowns, and yet thus far doesn’t seem to have suffered for it. (Wall St. Journal: “Smart or Lucky? How Florida Dodged the Worst of Coronavirus.”) According to the Apple Maps data, requests for walking and driving directions in Miami were down about 70% by late March. That’s very similar to the data from New York City. A reasonable hypothesis: citizens in large urban areas stayed put whether or not the government mandated it.

That said, search a big city today and you’ll almost certainly see an upward trend, but only for walking and driving directions; public transit requests have remained 70-80% below baseline in Boston, Chicago, DC, New York City, and San Francisco — cities with some of the largest public transit systems in the country. The future of public transit will be an interesting issue to follow. Last week — for the first time in its 115-year history — New York City’s subway system underwent a planned overnight shutdown, during which every single car was disinfected. I was in Manhattan on 9/11, and recall that the subway only completely stopped for about two hours. For a sense of the gravity of last week’s shutdown: daily NYC subway ridership is normally more than double the number of daily airline passengers in the entire country. And contrary to popular Twitter opinion, this does not mean that the subway was cleaned for the very first time and Andrew Carnegie’s fingerprints were finally wiped off the subway poles. Subway cars go out of service for cleaning every single night, it’s just not usually all of them at once. Plus, as if Carnegie took the subway. The man had a five-electric-car garage.

DRUG-TRADE DISRUPTION

Before I did some cartel reporting at ProPublica, I didn’t know anything about the drug trade. I certainly had no idea that most of the drugs that supply U.S. customers come through legal points of entry. Maybe the image in my head was a little too Hollywood — drug-loaded airplanes landing on makeshift runways in remote deserts.** The reality is that most imported drugs come right through border checkpoints. Here’s how one cartel lieutenant described a methamphetamine smuggling tactic to me: the gas tank of a car is removed and replaced with a smaller tank that is surrounded by a larger, outer container; meth is liquified and placed in the outer container; gas goes in the inner, smaller gas tank; if a border agent uses a gas tank scope (basically a cord with a mirror lens on the end) to look in the tank, they see gas, and if a dog sniffs the tank, it smells gas. Should that fail and the smuggler get caught, c’est la vie, eight of the next ten cars will get through.

That’s just one method I remember from my education about how drug traffickers would much rather use existing transportation and commerce systems than create their own. So it’s not terribly surprising that COVID-19 transit restrictions have seriously disrupted the drug trade, according to a United Nations report. Heroin tends to move by land, cocaine by sea; synthetic drugs like meth use a mix, but with more air trafficking (often just carried in luggage) than other types of drugs.

With international land and air traffic way down, drug smugglers are having a difficult time moving heroin and meth between countries. Ok, so, just for kicks, take a moment to guess what’s happening to drug prices….

Countries where drugs are produced are reporting lower prices; producers have more supply than can be moved, so they’re selling cheaply to traffickers. Meanwhile, countries that comprise the major demand markets for heroin and meth are reporting increased prices; difficulty trafficking has led to a shortage for retailers, so the drugs that do arrive carry a higher price tag. The U.N. analysis also notes that countries are reporting a large-scale switch of drug users from heroin to synthetic opioids, because of both price and availability. That’s precisely opposed to the plan of cartels in recent years, which has been to capitalize on the growing opioid addiction problem (particularly in the United States) by increasing the supply of heroin and selling it at better prices than legal painkillers. (Another tidbit learned in reporting.)

My main, high-level takeaway from cartel reporting was that the drug trade is part of a very complex economic system, and that altering one aspect — often via narrowly targeted law enforcement — will frequently backfire if nobody is keeping an eye on the overall system. In a concerning conclusion, the U.N. report notes that drug trafficking is way down right now, but the world may soon face a situation in which producers have massive stockpiles of drugs they want to move, along with hordes of impoverished people who desperately need work.

As Robin Bell, a brilliant scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (where once upon a time I worked in a lab), recently told the New York Times: “You wouldn’t want a doctor who just worried about one part of you; you want somebody to look at your entire system.” She was talking about the climate system, but the lesson holds for the drug economy, too.

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**That does happen, sometimes. The Arellano-Felix Organization once landed a commercial jet filled with 10 tons of cocaine on a makeshift runway in the desert near La Paz, Mexico. Unfortunately for the AFO, the plane got stuck in the sand. They unloaded it and then tried to blow it up, which didn’t work at all and is definitely an OSHA violation. So they brought construction equipment and hacked it up and tried to bury it. Also didn’t really work, and drew the attention of the Mexican military. Click on the image of said plane below to check out the ProPublica story.

LIGHTNING ROUND

• Speaking of opioids, here’s an unusual side effect of the pandemic: “Since March, federal officials have arguably done more to reform addiction medicine in the U.S. than they had in the two decades prior.”
• My former ProPublica cubicle neighbor, Megan Rose, was part of a team that just won a Pulitzer for an incredible investigation into a series of deadly naval accidents in the Pacific. (Links to every installment here.) Whether you’re into military performance, or some other type of work performance, this investigation into poor training and recovery practices should resonate. (When I traded my nice office at Sports Illustrated — with a big ole window 32 floors above 6th Ave. — for a crowded cubicle at ProPublica, it was to learn new skills by sitting near the Megans of the world.)
•  More on recovery practices: elite athletes may have superior “sleepability.” 
• Cory Doctorow’s wise conclusion on rules for writers: they’re never actually rules, but rather a guide to things that are really hard to do well.
• The College Board arranged this special virtual AP History lesson with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.
• Author Dave Eggers captured the confusion about COVID-19 public information in a satirical Q&A.

Thanks so much for reading. Until next time…

David

p.s. You can find previous Range Reports here, and if you have a friend who might enjoy this newsletter, they can subscribe here.