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Purpose – In this chapter, we expand the definition of disaster through combining the tenets of disaster studies with the literature on risks and consequences of war and conflict-related displacement and dislocation, with a focus on the challenges that drug misuse and changing drug markets present in these contexts. We conclude with policy recommendations for successful community rebuilding with relation to drugs and drug markets following various forms of disaster, gleaned from the combination of these areas of inquiry.

Design/methodology/approach – We discuss the concepts of risk, social vulnerability, and consequences as related to traditional conceptualizations of disaster, and highlight how they can also be applied to the study of veterans returning from war. We focus the on the similarities related to drugs and drug markets.

Findings – Overall, the similar vulnerabilities, potential for trauma, and drug-related consequences experienced by both disaster survivors and veterans suggest that the experience of war and return from such an event could be considered a disaster and analyzed as such.

Originality/value of power – Few scholars have examined how to expand the definition of a disaster and what is examined in the field of disaster studies. This chapter does this by examining how war could be analyzed as a disaster. It demonstrates the parallels between war and traditional disaster.

In view of the global warming that has increasingly been plaguing the earth, it should be no surprise that the world has been witnessing an unprecedented wave of natural disasters over the past decades. Among the most important of these natural calamities in recent years, mention can be made of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004, hurricanes Katrina and Irene in the United States in 2005, cyclone Nargis in Burma in 2008, the Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Ranging from earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, and floods to heat waves, storms, and epidemics, the field of disaster research presents a myriad of questions for social-scientific exploration.

In this study, we analyze the power of the individual return-to-volatility security performance heuristic (ri/stdi) to simplify the identification of securities to buy and, consequently, to form the optimal no short sales mean–variance portfolios. The heuristic ri/stdi is powerful enough to identify the long and shorts sets. This is due to the positive definiteness of the variance–covariance matrix – the key is to use the heuristic sequentially. At the investor level, the heuristic helps investors to decide what securities to consider first. At the portfolio level, the heuristic may help us find out whether it is a good idea to invest in equity to begin with. Our research may also help to integrate individual security analysis into portfolio optimization through improved security rankings.