Opium and Democracy
Published commentary by RAND staff.
May 4, 2005
United Press International
Victoria Greenfield (she/her) is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, and faculty affiliate with the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University. At RAND, she specializes in national security and international social and economic issues, including transnational crime. Greenfield also advises agencies on strategic planning, performance evaluation, and organizational structure and change. Her recent publications include seminal work on assessing the harms of crime and studies of the risks of illicit opioids in Asia-Pacific markets, revenues from human smuggling, controls for chemical explosive precursors, mechanisms for reducing Afghan opium production, and opportunities for strengthening federal agencies’ operations. Greenfield has also written on defense contracting, the defense industry, and international trade and globalization.
Previously, Greenfield managed research quality assurance for RAND’s Homeland Security Research Division (2020-2021) and was a visiting scholar at George Mason University (2015-2018), a visiting fellow and lecturer at Leuven Institute for Criminology in Belgium (2016, 2022), and the Admiral Crowe Chair in the Economics of the Defense Industrial Base at the U.S. Naval Academy (2005-2012). In addition, she chaired the National Academies’ committee on reducing the threat of improvised explosive devices (2016-2018) and was a member of the committee on border enforcement costs. Prior to 2000, she served as the senior economist for international trade and agriculture at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the chief international economist in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, U.S. Department of State, and a principal analyst with the Congressional Budget Office.
Victoria A. Greenfield and Letizia Paoli, Assessing the Harms of Crime: A New Framework for Criminal Policy, Oxford University Press, 2022
Greenfield, Victoria A., Blas Nunez-Neto, Ian Mitch, Joseph C. Chang, and Etienne Rosas, Human Smuggling and Associated Revenues: What Do or Can We Know About Routes from Central America to the United States?RAND Corporation (RR-2852-DHS), 2019
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Committee on Reducing the Threat of Improvised Explosive Device Attacks by Restricting Access to Chemical Explosive Precursors, Reducing the Threat of Improvised Explosive Device Attacks by Restricting Access to Explosive Precursor Chemicals, The National Academies Press, 2018
Victoria A. Greenfield, Craig A. Bond, Keith Crane, "A Household Model of Opium-Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan: Results and Lessons for Policymaking," Journal of Policy Modeling, 39(5), 2017
Victoria A. Greenfield, Letizia Paoli, and Andries Zoutendijk, "The Harms of Human Trafficking: Demonstrating the Applicability and Value of a New Framework for Systematic, Empirical Analysis," Global Crime, 17(2), 2016
Victoria A. Greenfield and Letizia Paoli, "If supply-oriented drug policy is broken, can harm reduction help fix it? Melding disciplines and methods to advance international drug-control policy," International Journal of Drug Policy, 23, 2012
Ryan R. Brady and Victoria A. Greenfield, "Competing explanations of U.S. defense industry consolidation in the 1990s and their policy implications," Contemporary Economic Policy, 28(2), 2010
Letizia Paoli, Victoria A. Greenfield, and Peter Reuter, The World Supply of Heroin: Can Supply Be Cut?Oxford University Press, 2009