A number of difficult truths we must confront
1. The drug war has failed.
We all know about the social problems, but fundamentally, drugs pose an economic problem because selling and transporting them is a relatively easy way to net hundreds or thousands of dollars that requires no special skills or large time commitments. For people who live in poverty and hold down dead-end jobs, entering the drug trade seems like (and often is) the quick and easy route to big money. As a neoclassical economist might put it, these people are making rational decisions to maximize their wealth given their assets and circumstances. An anthropologist would perhaps phrase it to say that these people are so disadvantaged that trafficking drugs are the only way they see out of their predicaments. However you slice it, drugs are big money for people who are used to working for pocket change and want a quick fix to their problems.
But something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It turns out that trafficking drugs isn’t as simple as it looks. Rival gangs spring up to compete for pieces of the pie; junkies rob and steal for cash to fuel their high-priced habits; addiction pulls apart families; law enforcement devotes more and more time to busting druggies and those who supply them; and all the while, affected neighborhoods deteriorate under the strain of these conflicts and the violence they spawn.
And so the inner cities become more and more unsafe and unstable. The middle classes flee for safer environs, while the poor, unable to afford to move (and often compounded by difficulty imagining life any other way), remain there to continue the cycle. Businesses take flight, resulting in higher unemployment and even more incentives to make a living trafficking drugs.
As one can imagine, a host of social problems result. Drug addiction levels in inner cities skyrocket. Families collapse under the strain of supporting or dealing with addicted members or addicted friends. Men father children and then leave. Boys grow up without fathers and never learn how to be men. Fatherless boys join gangs to feel masculine and shoot each other over minor slights and perceived disrespect. Emotions rule; responsibility becomes non-existent. The resulting gang violence, much of it taking the form of shootings, wracks the affected areas. The homeboys and thugz who survive to grow up father children and then leave just like their own fathers did. And the ugly cycle continues as long as the drugs keep flowing.
2. Drug-related violence and homicide does not affect all demographic groups equally.
After being illegally imported (usually from Mexico), drugs start their path in big cities. This is for purely practical reasons; though it’s true that poor people of all stripes are particularly drawn to drugs for various reasons, the drugs themselves enter cities first because of the volume and concentration of potential users pose a particularly attractive proposition. It helps that cities serve as useful distribution hubs for surrounding areas. So there’s nothing inherent about city-dwelling poor people that draws them to drugs more then other poor people; they just happen to live in locations that drug traders find lucrative.
So the drug problem is focused in poor inner cities for reasons of simple economics. These areas are populated mostly by black people for myriad reasons including past racism in housing policies, “white flight”, strong community ties, difficulty making enough money to afford to relocate, and a failure to imagine life anywhere else. It would then stand to reason that since drug-related problems are centered in poor inner cities which happen to be populated by black people, they would be most affected by the fallout. And sadly, this fallout often consists of homicide and other violence that results from drug trafficking and addiction. The U.S. Department of Justice arrived at the same conclusions.
As we can see, blacks commit much, much more homicide than white people do per capita:
(http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm)
But blacks are also the victims of much, much more homicide than whites are per capita:
(http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm)
What does this tell us? That black people are killing each other at alarming rates. And what would cause them to do that? Inner-city gang violence. If we look at statistics from the CDC, we can find that 61% of black homicide victims are between the ages of 15 and 29 — prime gang member ages; among whites, it’s only 45%. It is dismaying how often this senseless murder happens — 39 million black Americans commit 1.1 times as many homicides as the remaining 267 million white, hispanic, Asian, and indian Americans combined. That’s right, the 16% of the population that’s black commits more murder than the 84% that’s not black.
This figure is staggering. Black gang members are practically killing each other off in America’s poorest inner cities, and they’re doing it because of a lack of male role models and the lure of high profits in drug trafficking. Again, thank you drug war. On the other hand, this reveals another curious truth:
3. Gun violence in America is mostly an urban black phenomenon.
More black people are actually killed using guns each year than white people, and 94% of them are killed by other black people. Again, this is because many of the perpetrators are gang members who are shooting each other over drugs and a lack of props. The use of guns in homicide, like many things violence-related, is heavily skewed toward the typical gang ages:
(http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/homicide/weapons.htm)
Black people commit four times as many drug-related homicides as white people per capita and 2.56 times as many gang-related homicides per capita. Coincidence? No, it’s just the fallout from the drug war destroying communities and teaching children that violence is the right way to live.
This also explains why most forms of gun control fail to do much. The vast majority of laws restrict the ability of people to walk into retail stores and buy certain types of guns (often so-called “military-style” rifles and semi-automatic handguns), but gang members and other criminals don’t buy their guns in stores. Then there are laws that require licenses to buy certain weapons, but those don’t work because gang members acquire their guns illegally, giving them no incentive whatsoever to become licensed and register their guns. Finally, there are laws that restrict whether or not people can carry guns in public and where they can carry them, except that gang members carry their guns wherever they want irrespective of the law.
This country doesn’t have a gun problem. It has a gang problem which is caused by a drug problem. There are between 238 and 276 million legally-owned guns in this country. The extremely miniscule minority of Americans who are gang members or criminals will manage to acquire, carry, and use guns. The bottom line is this: no amount of gun control will ever stop a very, very small number of black teenaged gang members from shooting each other over drugs because they grew up without fathers or morals. No morals? you ask. How can that be true? Isn’t that just closet racism? Here’s how:
4. Decades of violence have destroyed and perverted urban black families and culture
First, let me say that I in no way mean to denigrate black people in general here. I have personally known many, many middle-class African-Americans and many Africans as well; in fact, I have lived in a small African village, and I have tutored African immigrants in English. Without fail, all these people have been generous, kind, and hardworking. But there’s something toxic about urban black culture that so often leads kids down the path of vice and violence, the that’s what I’m talking about here.
As I’ve already shown, drugs, their trafficking, and the addiction they cause have resulted in a noxious combination of unemployment, depression, violence, and misery in predominantly black inner cities. This battlefield environment has sadly all but annihilated urban black families. Entire generations of black kids have grown up around drugs, gangs, crime, and violence, and as a result, the urban black family has all but collapsed under the weight. 70% of black children now grow up fatherless. Absent a father or any good male role models, young black boys never learn what manhood is truly about, and so they fall in with gangs, mistaking the feeling of toughness for masculinity. When they grow older, they father children of their own and quickly leave the mothers, just like their own fathers did, perpetuating and exacerbating the cycle.
Absent any real positive male role models, black boys find inspiration among thugs, gangbangers, and criminals. A culture of violence slowly began to develop over the years, with kids actively disdaining education and scholastic achievement in favor of robbery, shooting, and fathering even more children by even more young women. This is why more forms of birth control and sex education being made available don’t curb the flow of babies; so many of the young mothers want to have many children as early as possible. It’s also why better education in inner cities so often fails; many of the kids simply don’t care about learning.
This is an intractable problem. Most of the reason why the government has failed to really make a dent in it is because it’s trying to address the symptoms rather than the true cause: the drug war. Increasing law enforcement results in more arrests and convictions, but it doesn’t address why people deal drugs. Enacting gun control measures disarms people who aren’t at risk and does nothing to stem the flow of gang violence, and furthermore, it doesn’t address why young black men want to kill each other. Piling on more social programs does little because they don’t address why those they target fail to fix their lives on their own.
5. Legalize drugs and these problems will slowly disappear.
It’s simple supply and demand. People want drugs (high demand) but the DEA does its damnedest to curtail the flow (low supply). High demand with a low supply equals high price. This is ECON 101 here. As long as the price remains high, poor people will traffic it to make money — big money. Our policies for the last few decades have all been centered around reducing the supply by intercepting drugs at the border, confiscating stashes, arresting dealers and the like, and yet more people then ever get high. Somehow, our supply-side policies have failed. If anything, coming down hard on the supply has only increased demand, and it’s raised prices, too, which is good for the Mexican suppliers and bad for those who live around inner city addicts and drug gangs.
Addressing demand is tough, though. It’s anyone’s guess how to reduce addiction. Drug users are poor, rich, white, black, privileged, and disadvantaged. School programs? Heavy legal consequences? Extensive rehabilitation? Better parenting? Less stress? Better coping mechanisms? Reducing the culture of escapism and abdication of responsibility? These are truly difficult questions.
But until we arrive at answers for them, there’s an easy thing we can do: legalize the drugs. Now, I don’t advocate this because I’m a big fan of getting high. I have never once used illegal drugs, and I never intend to. I’m in fact strongly against the use of drugs; it’s just that I feel that far, far more social problems are created by illegalizing drugs than are solved by it.
What will happen once we legalize drugs? Prices will fall and the underground industry will lose its advantage as legal companies spring up. Gangs will wane as it becomes easier and cheaper to buy the goods legally. Illegal demand will collapse, legal demand will stabilize. The government will be able to regulate and tax the substances in question, leading to new revenue streams and new ways to combat addiction and abuse.
None of this should sound unfamiliar; it’s exactly what happened when alcohol was re-legalized following our experiment with prohibition in the 1920s and early 30s. Big surprise: it failed miserably in exactly the same way that the drug war is failing now. Despite supply falling, demand actually rose, prices skyrocketed, millions of citizens became criminals, and ugly underground organizations fought each other and the law for the precious liquor.
As soon as it was legalized, many of these problems simply vanished. It’s unlikely a recovery of the same speed will happen with drugs because it’s been a looooong time since they were legal, but over time, things will stabilize. They did with alcohol, and they can with drugs. And until we legalize and regulate drugs just like we do with alcohol and cigarettes, street prices and addiction levels will continue to rise. It is inevitable.