Individuals in the business of growing, importing, and distributing illegal drugs must design their organization to be agency-loss-minimizing under the illicit market conditions. The most important potential costs are violence and the theft of money or drugs by other drug dealers and seizure of assets and loss of liberty by police. Dealers spend a great deal of time and effort to reduce these costs; one of the important services they buy is assistance in avoiding competition or law enforcement. Also, the monitoring, incentives, and services of others used toward this end have costs of their own in personnel, money, time, and goodwill. Regardless of the form of the organization, a dealing organization can use three motives to reduce its agents' rate of betrayal: fear, either of arrest or of violence; incentives, including money, drugs, and prestige; and long-range trust. Trust can take two forms: one is practical (reputation is both evidence of and incentive for trustworthiness), and the other is based on the way that feelings of friendship and loyalty develop over time in business transactions. Organizations will use these resources differently, as their leaders weigh the relative benefits of various levels of cooperation, control, and coordination. 4 footnotes