Balloon effect

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The balloon effect is an often cited criticism of United States drug policy. The balloon effect describes what happens when a person squeeze some part of a latex balloon, the balloon will bulge out elsewhere. This describes drug crops’ tendency to move to new areas in response to local eradication campaigns.

This effect happened:

with fumigation of marijuana in Mexico, in which the drugs migrated to Colombia.
with marijuana in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which migrated to Cauca.
In the late 1990's coca was largely eradicated in Peru and Bolivia, only to be replaced by new crops in Colombia.^[1]
Recently, with the intense spraying in the Colombian department (state) of Putumayo, coca has been planted in other departments including Arauca, Cauca, Caquetá, Guaviare, Huila, Meta, Nariño, and Santander.

A United Nations Development Programme Colombia described the balloon effect this way:

"The economic mechanism underlying the global effect is quite simple: the success of eradication in one area temporarily reduces the supply, and that translates into a price rise. Then, given that the supply function is fairly elastic, higher prices stimulate people to plant crops in other places." The costs to start planting are quite low "given that the majority of property rights on land planted with illicit crops are ill defined."^[2]

[edit] Other Contexts in Which This Term can be Applied

This also describes the offsetting behavior in health care when costs shift from hospital care to home care.
A software development colloquialism, it is often used to describe the effect of fixing a bug or problem in one area of the system, where the fix itself then causes another problem to occur; fixing this subsequent issue then results in further problems, ad infinitum.

[edit] Notes

^ "Stopping it, How Government Try--And Fail--to Stem the Flow of Drugs" (July 26 2001). The Economist. "The main targets of American supply-reduction campaigns over the years have been Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The net effect appears to have been a relocation and reorganisation of production, not a cutback. Dramatic falls in coca cultivation in Peru and Bolivia in the late 1990s coincided with an equally dramatic rise in Colombia, even though almost all the top people in Colombia's notorious Cali cartel had been jailed in the mid-1990s."
^ "National Human Development Report Chapter 13: Taking Narcotics Out of the Conflict:The War on Drugs" (2003). pnud.org United Nations Development Programme Colombia.