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DrugSense : How Do Drug Laws Influence Crime?
| How Do Drug Laws Influence Crime?
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The US has evolved a system of criminal prohibition to "control" the "drug
problem." In fact the official title for the office headed by drug czar
McCaffery is "Office of Drug Control Policy." Just a moment's analysis
reveals the fallacy: if drugs are outlawed, the only way they can be
manufactured and sold is by criminals. In other words, criminals are handed
a lucrative monopoly by laws prohibiting drugs. What is more, the
government is sworn to protect that monopoly, no matter what!
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How much "control" can the government have over a criminal market? The
answer is none; criminal markets can only be suppressed, and not very
efficiently, at that. The result is a vicious cycle: prices are kept high
by illegality, this guarantees high (untaxed) profits and a steady supply
of low level workers in the retail drug market. A steady stream of arrests
does little more than provide work for criminal justice and corrections
workers and divert precious tax dollars away from education. Poorly
educated, inner city youth view the arrest of the dealer down the street as
an employment opportunity,thus perpetuating the cycle.
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Meanwhile, their customers are forced to steal to be able to afford the
drugs to which they have become addicted. At the higher level of wholesaler
and importer, drug deals are very dangerous because mundane business
issues of delivery, payment, quality and competition become, in a lucrative
criminal market, issues to be settled by violence. The financiers and major
entrepreneurs in this multi billion dollar criminal industry remain unknown
to the public and free to launder their huge profits by investing them in
legitimate industries,
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Added to this intolerable situation is the practice of forfeiture, recently
initiated by the federal government and increasingly imitated by local
jurisdictions, apparenly so eager to tap into the profits of the illegal
drug market that they literally can no longer wait to be bribed.
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Within the criminal "justice" system, conviction is the major goal of
prosecutors armed with draconian mandatory minimums and almost unlimited
deal making authority to suborn the testimony of one member of a "criminal
conspiracy" in order to railroad another. It is a system where the
guiltiest has the most valuable testimony to sell and is consequently the
most likely to go free. A record number of senior federal judges now refuse
to hear drug cases.
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The scare stories placed by government to justify their continuing and ever
expanding "war" inevitably advertise the illegal product and expand the
market. The proof is that kilogram seizures made headlines in the 70s; now
it takes tons to make the late news.
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