| 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! |
| 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. |
| 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, |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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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