SHOULD THE DEA’S STRIDE DATA BE USED FOR ECONOMIC ANALYSES OF MARKETS FOR ILLEGAL DRUGS? by

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) STRIDE data contain records of acquisitions of illegal drugs by undercover agents and informants of the DEA and Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia. These data are widely used in economic analyses of markets for illegal drugs. The STRIDE data are mainly records of acquisitions made to support criminal investigations and are not a random sample of an identifiable population. This paper presents evidence that the STRIDE data on cocaine and heroin prices are not representative of market prices for those drugs. Specifically, there are large differences among price estimates obtained from different subsets of STRIDE. It is concluded that STRIDE is not a reliable source of price data for economic and policy analyses that require accurate measures of price levels and variations. I thank Cecilia Balzer, Robert Brown, Robert Janice, Maurice Rinfrey, and Carolyn Travers of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for providing the STRIDE data and helping with their interpretation. Jeffrey Grogger also assisted with the preparation and interpretation of the data. Charles Manski, William Nordhaus, and John Pepper provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The research was supported in part by NSF grants SBR-9617925 and SES9910925.