Platform economics can turn up in unexpected places—even in an article on Belgium’s fight against drug trafficking. A recent Guardian interview with Belgium’s drugs commissioner, Ine Van Wymersch, suggests three revealing parallels: platforms can be exploited as criminal infrastructure; platform labour conditions can have social spillovers; and drug trafficking itself may be moving from hierarchy toward a more networked, platform-like structure.
The article describes how drug networks exploit ordinary commercial infrastructures: short-term rentals to store or prepare drugs, cash and weapons; parcel and delivery systems to make movements less conspicuous; and digitally connected, flexible labour to carry out low-level tasks. Van Wymersch’s central message is that enforcement is essential but insufficient: policy must also reduce the supply of vulnerable recruits through education, housing, anti-poverty measures and better-paid work.
1. Airbnb’s control problem
Short-term rental platforms reduce the costs of finding, booking and coordinating access to accommodation. That is their legitimate value proposition—but it can also be repurposed by criminals seeking temporary, adaptable operational space.
Van Wymersch gives a vivid example:
“You need someone to pick up a cargo from the harbour. You don’t know exactly when the boat will arrive. Well, you can hire an Airbnb apartment or studio for three days. It’s very flexible. If the boat is not coming to Antwerp but going to Marseille, there is free cancellation.”
The passage is almost a lesson in transaction-cost economics. Fast booking, flexibility and cancellation make the platform attractive to ordinary guests; the same attributes lower criminals’ coordination costs when a shipment’s timing or route is uncertain. In the language of Platform Strategies, Airbnb helps independent users search, match, contract and coordinate. This is exactly why its infrastructure can create legitimate value at scale—and why it can also be misused.
The commissioner is careful not to treat the platform as inherently illicit: short-term rental firms have “a very good legal purpose,” she says, but “need to be more resilient to avoid abuse by criminals.” This is the familiar platform control paradox: decentralisation, scale and user autonomy create choice and flexibility, but they reduce the operator’s direct visibility over offline conduct. The governance problem is therefore not whether Airbnb intended the use, but how it can detect and deter high-harm misuse without making legitimate booking prohibitively burdensome.
2. Competing for young workers
A second parallel concerns the labour market. Delivery platforms and drug networks may draw on overlapping pools of potential workers: young, economically vulnerable urban people with limited formal qualifications and weak access to stable employment. That does not mean couriers are criminals, nor that delivery work causes criminal involvement. It means that insecure, low-paid legal work may offer an inadequate alternative when criminal networks can pay substantially more for a discrete, risky task.
Van Wymersch explicitly includes “adequate pay for delivery workers” among the policies needed to reduce recruitment into the drug economy. She also warns that delivery firms are “very at risk” of being instrumentalised because a delivery van and a small package no longer automatically appear suspicious.
The mechanism is comparative. Food-delivery platforms often organise labour as fragmented gigs: workers are matched to short tasks, paid per delivery and exposed to uncertainty in demand, waiting time and algorithmic allocation. Criminal networks can also offer fragmented tasks—couriering, handling a parcel, lookout work, temporary storage or operational support—but with a potentially much larger immediate payment. Better-paid, more secure delivery work would not solve the drug problem, but it could improve the legal outside option and thus reduce the appeal of illicit “gigs” for some vulnerable recruits.
This is a negative external effect that a conventional platform scorecard may miss. Low consumer prices and rapid delivery benefit diners and restaurants, but if the resulting model transfers too much risk and income insecurity to couriers, some of the social cost may fall on neighbourhoods and public authorities. A multisided perspective asks not only whether the customer–restaurant–courier match works, but also who bears its wider consequences.
3. From drug franchise to ecosystem
My intuitive model of drug trafficking came from Chapter 3 of Freakonomics, “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” (see also the article by Dennis Rogers). Based on Sudhir Venkatesh’s fieldwork, Levitt and Dubner portray a 1990s Chicago crack gang as a remarkably conventional hierarchy—a franchise-like organisation. A central “board of directors” granted the gang leader—whom Venkatesh calls J.T. —the right to sell in a twelve-block territory in exchange for nearly 20% of revenue; J.T. managed officers and street-level foot soldiers.
It was also a classic tournament. J.T. made about $8,500 per month, while foot soldiers earned only about $3.30 an hour—below the then minimum wage. Low-level workers accepted poor pay and extreme risks partly because a tiny number could hope to move up to the lucrative upper ranks.
The model Van Wymersch describes is different. In her account, organised crime is moving away from stable “top-down pyramid hierarchies bonded by trust” toward loose networks that outsource specialised functions—such as money laundering, weapons and logistics—to external providers. Europol similarly reports that networks increasingly use young recruits in modular roles, including street dealers, couriers, warehouse workers and those extracting drugs from containers; online platforms and messaging services have become important recruitment tools.
The “platform” analogy is deliberately tentative. These networks are not necessarily platforms in the strict sense: we may not (yet?) observe one identifiable intermediary that systematically matches distinct user groups and governs their interactions. But they are platform-like in their use of modularity, outsourcing and low-cost coordination. They assemble specialised services rather than fully internalising them—much as a platform orchestrates interactions among independent participants.
Conclusion
The article’s deeper lesson is that platforms do not only change consumer markets; they reshape the costs of organising activity. Short-term rentals can become adaptable criminal infrastructure; gig-work conditions can affect the relative attractiveness of legal and illegal tasks; and criminal organisations themselves can adopt ecosystem-like forms.
The policy response should not be to equate platforms with criminality. It should be to recognise that platforms manage network effects and transaction costs—and therefore must also help manage the harmful externalities that can arise when their infrastructure, incentives or labour models are exploited.
