Mexican drug cartels have long been major players in the global drug trade. In recent years, these cartels have increasingly turned to the production and trafficking of synthetic drugs, including fentanyl. A powerful synthetic opioid, fentanyl has emerged as a key driver of the overdose crisis in the United States. In addition, the competition for control of drug trafficking routes and markets has fueled violent conflicts between cartels, contributing to violence and instability in Latin America and the Caribbean. The global synthetic drugs revolution has transformed the landscape of the drug trade, presenting new challenges for law enforcement, policymakers, and public health officials which require a comprehensive and coordinated response.
The Georgetown Americas Institute is pleased to host Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, to a conversation about the policy challenges posed by the global synthetic drug revolution. The conversation will be moderated by Alejandro Werner, founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute.
Featuring
Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. She is the director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors. She is also the co-director of the Africa Security Initiative and the Brookings series on opioids, The Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions. Previously, she was the co-director of the Brookings project Improving Global Drug Policy: Comparative Perspectives Beyond UNGASS 2016, as well as of another Brookings project, Reconstituting Local Orders. Felbab-Brown is an expert on international and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, organized crime, urban violence, and illicit economies. Her publications include The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It (2018); Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption (2021); and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (2010). She is also the author of numerous policy reports, academic articles, and opinion pieces. Felbab-Brown received her doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University.
Alejandro Werner is the founding director of the Georgetown Americas Institute and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. He recently completed almost nine years as director of the Western Hemisphere Department at the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that appointment, he was undersecretary of finance and public credit in Mexico’s Finance Ministry and held several positions in that ministry and the Central Bank. He also taught at leading universities in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).