In the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2019, law enforcement launched a coordinated operation to dismantle a multi-million dollar drug trafficking organization in a single sweep. A force of 160 officers from the FBI, Homeland Security, the Army National Guard, and the Philadelphia Police Department, in collaboration with the Office of the Attorney General, targeted thirteen residences within a single blighted Philadelphia neighborhood to dismantle an operation that generated approximately $7.7 million in sales annually. By sunrise that morning, officers had seized 4.9 kg of fentanyl-laced heroin—about 170,000 doses worth $1.7 million—and nearly a kilogram of crack cocaine. Eleven individuals were arrested, including the organization’s leader, two of his lieutenants, and four key dealers. In one morning, the operation removed one of the city’s largest drug trafficking rings and reclaimed a city block long plagued by their activities.
The operation was part of the Kensington Initiative, a law enforcement strategy led by Pennsylvania’s Office of the Attorney General aimed at dismantling the open-air drug market that has long plagued Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. The core of the initiative is its intelligence-driven law enforcement approach. Rather than flooding the area with police officers and arresting anyone suspected of drug activity—tactics reminiscent of the stop-and-frisk era during the crack epidemic— the focus is on gathering comprehensive intelligence over several months. This allows law enforcement to pinpoint specific individuals and locations involved in the drug trade, leading to more effective and strategic enforcement.
A dedicated state attorney is assigned to prosecute all cases arising from the sweeps, becoming actively involved in the investigation from the earliest stages, including the selection of targets. While neighborhood residents have long stressed their concerns and fears about the drug market occupying their neighborhood, the recent surge in police presence brought new anxieties regarding safety in the neighborhood. Despite these concerns, the Initiative initially included social efforts to improve the neighborhood’s conditions. This involved cleaning up the physical environment and connecting residents with drug treatment programs and social services. Law enforcement’s focus on disrupting the market’s supply side was balanced with programs aimed at addressing the needs of individuals on the demand side, as well as protecting uninvolved residents who found themselves caught in the middle of the crisis.
The Valentine’s Day sweep was far from a “light-touch” approach. It was highly targeted and efficient, accomplishing its specific goals. Like the NYPD gang takedowns detailed in research by Aaron Chalfin, Mike LaForest, and Jacob Kaplan, the Kensington Initiative prioritized precision over broad, indiscriminate actions. Rather than simply increasing police presence or visibility, the Initiative focused its efforts on identifying key objectives and executing them strategically. Over nearly four years, fewer than ten sweeps were conducted, but their impact was significant. Yet, my research shows that these targeted efforts led to a 20% reduction in overdose mortality across the Philadelphia metropolitan area and disrupted supply chains feeding smaller drug markets throughout the region. By cutting off distribution hubs that flowed outward from Kensington, this Initiative stifled the spread of drugs. Approaches like this are essential to curbing the opiate epidemic in America.
The opiate epidemic
In 2023, for the third consecutive year, over 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, bringing the death toll over the past five years to a staggering 489,000. The nation is currently facing the deadliest phase of the opioid opiate epidemic to date.
The crisis traces its origins to the 1990s, when the pharmaceutical painkiller Oxycontin was aggressively marketed across the country. Recent research reveals that areas where the drug was initially promoted and made widely available experienced sharp increases in overdose deaths in the following years. Many patients who were prescribed OxyContin became addicted, leading to widespread misuse and diversion of the drug, which fueled the growing epidemic.
In 2010, the company behind OxyContin introduced an “abuse-deterrent” reformulation in an effort to curb misuse and mitigate growing negative publicity. Instead of curtailing the crisis, however, this change marked the beginning of the epidemic’s second wave. A 2018 study from Abby Alpert, David Powell, and Rosalie Liccardo Pacula found that states with higher rates of OxyContin abuse experienced significant spikes in heroin-related overdose deaths following the reformulation. Addicted users, faced with a costlier and harder-to-abuse OxyContin, turned to cheaper and deadlier alternatives like heroin. Similarly, a forthcoming paper by Adam Soliman shows that the removal of individual over-prescribing doctors led to localized increases in heroin overdose mortality, further illustrating that efforts to restrict prescription opioids inadvertently pushed those with an inelastic demand for a drug-induced high toward heroin, fueling the epidemic’s second deadly wave.
The skyrocketing demand for illicit opioids spurred rapid innovation in the drug trade, leading to the widespread introduction of fentanyl into the black market heroin supply roughly a decade ago. Fentanyl is not only cheaper than heroin but also about 50 times as potent — and tragically, much deadlier. A dose as small as two milligrams can be fatal. With the increasing prevalence of fentanyl and its analogues came massive increases in overdose mortality nationwide. Overdose death rates more than doubled as fentanyl evolved from a pervasive cutting agent found in heroin into the dominant street opiate of the era. This transition has fueled the current public health crisis, where nearly one in five Americans now report having a family member or close friend who has died from a drug overdose.
Public health strategies aimed at reducing overdose deaths have largely fallen short in curbing mortality rates. A 2022 paper by Jennifer Doleac and Anita Mukherjee found that increasing the availability of Naloxone, a drug capable of reversing opiate overdoses, had no effect on overdose mortality. Instead, opioid-related emergency room admissions rose, suggesting that some users responded to the reduced risk of fatal overdose by increasing their drug consumption. This outcome echoes findings from another 2022 study by Analisa Packham, which showed that the introduction of syringe exchange programs in certain counties—intended to lower the risk of viral transmission from intravenous drug use—also led to higher overdose mortality. Like Naloxone access, syringe exchange programs effectively lowered the perceived cost of drug use, resulting in increased consumption among users.
There are clear benefits to addressing the opiate crisis through public health initiatives, as it is fundamentally a public health issue. However, given the nature of addiction– where demand remains inelastic–public health approaches alone are unlikely to fully resolve the crisis.
To effectively combat the current opioid epidemic, law enforcement efforts must target the underlying black markets driving its growth if we hope to see a substantial decline in overdose rates. A recent study by Timothy Moore and Kevin Schnepel provides compelling evidence that supply-side interventions can achieve this outcome. They analyzed the effects of a large-scale disruption to the heroin supply in Australia during the early 2000s, triggered by a surge in drug interdiction efforts. Despite the country being in the grip of its own heroin epidemic, the significant reduction in supply led to a sharp and sustained decline in mortality rates among known opioid users. This illustrates that targeted, high-level enforcement can have meaningful, long-term public health benefits by disrupting the availability of deadly drugs.
The Australian experience may not fully translate to other contexts, given the unique factors at play: Australia’s geographic isolation and the fact that there was no readily available substitute for heroin at the time. However, the key takeaway is that when effective supply-side enforcement disrupts the drug market in an environment lacking immediate alternatives, it can significantly reduce user mortality. This prompts the question of how to design target law enforcement strategies that can similarly minimize the presence of potential substitutes—creating the conditions needed to achieve lasting, life-saving outcomes.
My recent research presents a theory on how targeted interventions in a regional drug market, populated by mobile drug users, can have widespread impacts. When law enforcement efforts focus on the center of a regional market, the supply shock is transmitted downstream to the smaller satellite markets. Basic economic principles then take hold: as supply dwindles, prices surge across the entire region, making it difficult for users to find cheaper alternatives regardless of where they seek their drugs.
To substantiate this theoretical framework, I examined a law enforcement initiative that sought to do just that.
Kensington
No place in the United States captures the ongoing opiate crisis quite like Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. Once a factory neighborhood, Kensington became a hub for illegal drug activity in the 1970s as deindustrialization spurred an exodus of employers. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, while prescription opioid abuse surged nationwide, Kensington gained notoriety for its high-quality heroin. As prescription opioids became harder to obtain, users turned to Kensington’s drug market, lured by a purer and more potent Colombian variety of heroin, transforming the neighborhood into a magnet for those desperate for a new fix.
The market expanded rapidly. Today, more than 80 Kensington street corners are occupied by dealers, and what is arguably the largest open-air drug market in the United States is the regional epicenter of the opiate crisis. Somewhat infamously, in 2018 the New York Times dubbed the neighborhood “the Walmart of Heroin.” Drugs originating from Kensington are found in overdoses across neighboring states and counties. Mobile users travel long distances to the neighborhood, while retailers supply smaller drug markets throughout the region. From 2015 to 2019, Kensington saw over 630 fatal overdoses in its 1.4 square miles. The neighborhood has become a symbol of the nation’s drug crisis, drawing journalists and social media influencers who document what many view as a microcosm of the destruction caused by more than two decades of the opioid epidemic.
Against this backdrop, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro launched the Kensington Initiative in the summer of 2018. Unlike previous law enforcement strategies, the Initiative emphasized a collaborative, intelligence-driven approach involving federal, state, and local agencies. Rather than defaulting to the widespread arrests of low-level dealers—a hallmark of the crack epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s—the Kensington Initiative focused on dismantling entire organizations through careful, prolonged investigations. Investigations would take weeks or months as a task force composed of agents from across numerous law enforcement agencies would identify target organizations, determine their membership structure, and finally initiate a takedown in a grand show of force, removing the entire target organization in a single sweep.
The initiative worked
The first three years of the Initiative saw six sweeps and millions of dollars worth of heroin and fentanyl removed from the neighborhood. The seizure of these narcotics from the market spurred widespread downstream impacts that reverberated across the region.
In my research, I use cell phone location data to analyze the demand-side impacts of the Initiative. Many mobile phone apps include location tracking software, and the resulting data is then aggregated and sold by data brokerage companies. By leveraging this data, I can track movement patterns across the Philadelphia metropolitan region and estimate how the Initiative has influenced shifts in movement.
I find that following the supply shock in Kensington there was a 20-30% reduction in visits to the neighborhood. Less people came, and those that did, visited less frequently. Other known areas of drug trafficking across the metropolitan area saw a 15-20% reduction in visits. Traffic between Kensington and these other areas fell by around 10%. Demand for narcotics in the directly targeted area and in downstream markets up to 30 miles away also plummeted. It became clear that the supply chain running from Kensington to other regional dealers was disrupted.
The disruption of this drug market triggered tangible, positive downstream impacts. Overdose mortality across the Philadelphia metropolitan area dropped by approximately 20% relative to the other U.S. metro areas with the highest rates of overdoses. Additionally, the dispensing of Buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid-use disorder, increased by 25% in the Philadelphia metro area relative to other regions—indicating that the Kensington Initiative was successfully steering users away from illegal narcotics. Remarkably, these significant improvements were achieved with just 115 arrests resulting from the Initiative’s targeted sweeps.
The strategic allocation of police resources proved highly effective. One of the largest illegal drug markets in the Western Hemisphere was severely impacted by just over 100 arrests. Compared to the widespread increases in arrest rates used during the crack epidemic, the Kensington approach’s impact is profound.
Crack cocaine first appeared in the early 1980s. During the course of that decade, drug possession arrests increased by 89% and drug sale arrests increased by 210%. In the same period, the country’s prison population more than doubled, increasing by 161% and laying the foundations for an era of mass incarceration that we as a country are dealing with now. Incarceration is costly. Philadelphia spends around $51,000 per inmate per year and individuals with felony convictions later have an extremely difficult time entering the labor force.
The stop-and-frisk style of policing widely used during that period not only fueled mass incarceration but was also ineffective in combating drug crime. Research suggests that general suspicion stops have no impact on drug crimes or drug crime arrests. Moreover, street-level effort aimed at arresting low-level dealers spurs increases in drug overdoses as users are pushed to a risky search for substitute dealers and narcotics.
In combating our nation’s opiate epidemic, intelligence-based law enforcement works. Strategically allocated and effectively targeted policing resources can profoundly disrupt the narcotic black markets fueling this crisis. The organizations that operate in the markets for illegal drugs are primarily hierarchical and network-based. These forms of organization provide a vulnerability at which law enforcement can strike.The Kensington Initiative’s case study demonstrates this point.Targeted arrests and seizures are cost-effective and, through the supply chain disruptions they induce, can leave users without an alternative product or dealer. Policing effort targeted at removing the big players, rather than those at the street-level, can yield massive payoffs.