I think that many readers might consider “Operation Gravy Train,” the massive law enforcement initiative culminating with the arrest of 106 alleged drug traffickers, to be a great success. It was successful in the sense that it required an impressive degree of managerial ability, discretion, and technical skill on the part of law enforcement. They should be commended for this and for their professionalism when executing their mission. However, the public’s definition of success should be broader and answer this question: will this have a lasting positive impact on the community? An objective and historical assessment is that it will not, and here is why.

1) Supply and Demand — Illicit drugs provide huge profits to cartels and dealers precisely because of actions like Operation Gravy Train. These actions create artificial scarcity in the illicit drug market which renders the illegal sale of drugs extremely profitable. The manipulation of market forces by police action ensures that the next generation of would-be drug dealers have a profitable marketplace to engage with. No amount of police action will reverse this. In fact, it will only make potential profits more irresistible to traffickers. Reducing demand, the only element in the equation that could produce the desired effect of drug deprofitization, is not accomplished by police action.

2) Scale — Police seized approximately $90,000 worth of prepackaged drugs and nearly as much in cash. There are also reports of raw drugs packaged in bulk. This is an astonishingly low quantity of contraband to obtain from an action that was nearly a year in development, required thousands of man-hours across dozens of agencies, and resulted in over 100 arrests. While we may not have an accurate estimate of the true economic impact of illegal drugs in upstate New York, we can guess. Using the same methods applied by a PBS Frontline article (1) to estimate the money spent by New York City residents on illegal drugs, we can approximate that residents of Jefferson, St. Lawrence, and Franklin counties spend $550,000 per week on illegal drugs. It took a nearly year of planning by every law enforcement agency in the region to snatch less than half of that. It is a drop of water in the ocean.

3) Opportunity cost — We do not know the full investment of public resources made in Operation Gravy Train. Dozens of federal, state, and local agencies coordinated on an endeavor to arrest a collection of non-violent drug offenders. Will this investment be recovered in any meaningful way? Even if law enforcement applied the seized money to cover some of the operational costs, $90,000 would barely pay the interest on a BearCat armored police vehicle. Unfortunately, the public waste expended during this operation will pale in comparison to the money yet to be spent on the accused. Tax payers must now house them, feed them, transport them, guard them, prosecute them, and in many cases defend them through the provision of public defense attorneys. Unless diverted to the state drug court system, tax payers will pay for their incarceration, unlucky as New York State spends the most per prisoner annually at approximately $60,000 per year. After their eventual release from prison, what will the community have gained from this monumental investment? We will inherit a mass of largely unskilled, unemployable, desperate individuals who see the world of addiction and crime as the only one that will have them.

4) People — Though over 100 arrests were made, it is likely that most of these people are merely low-level dealers rather than violent gang members as they have been portrayed in the media; opportunists who sell a small amount of drugs to support their own addiction. This is inferred from the low quantity of contraband yielded per arrest and from details provided in the grand jury indictments. Most of the suspects are unknown to me, but I recognize two names from our shared time in high school. I feel bad for them. They made choices years ago that resulted in a terrible addiction. While it is true that their bad decisions break the law and place others at risk, it is equally true that locking them up for a term of years is unlikely to add any lasting value to the community. In innumerable ways, it will perpetuate a cross-generational cycle of despair, addiction, drug profiteering, and public waste from which we choose not to escape.

Dan McGraw is from Charleston, S.C.