How Prohibition Affects Crime, Law Enforcement and the Press


How Prohibition Affects Crime, Law Enforcement and the Press
If demand for a banned product persists after a prohibition is enacted, a criminal market is created automatically. If the banned item is difficult to produce, hide, and use-say a nuclear weapon- the prohibition may well be successful (at least for a while). On the other hand, if there is strong demand, and the product is easy to produce and smuggle, the criminal market will quickly expand to satisfy that demand. Owners in the criminal market are awarded a lucrative tax-free monopoly on their products. The value of this monopoly is further enhanced because the prohibitory legislation is a modern alchemy; it adds to the value of theretofore cheaply produced, mundane products.
While criminal markets remain subject to basic economic laws, they also operate under unique conditions which produce important differences from the way legal markets function. Among them is a strong incentive for secrecy; they can't be studied with the standard tools economists use on other markets; thus no economic data from criminal markets can be meaningfully compared to those available for every other product in our society.
Another important difference: criminal markets have no peaceful means for resolving the inevitable disputes over territory and access which plague every market and which are normally resolved by courts or regulators. Shaky agreements with other criminals or uneasy truces punctuated by violence, become their modus operandi. To the extent the markets become lucrative, they have the potential for extreme violence.
A corollary of the monopoly awarded to criminals for production and sale of banned products is the companion monopoly awarded to law enforcement, who become the only agents empowered to deal with them. They alone can legally buy their products, trap and apprehend vendors and consumers, and interdict shipments. This has created two highly undesirable situations: the most obvious is the well understood inducement to corruption that comes from unmonitored contact between poorly paid policemen and enormously rich criminals.
A second and less well appreciated consequence of the police monopoly on interaction with illegal drug markets is their virtual monopoly on information that flows from it. There is no way ordinary citizens can observe a criminal market other than by becoming its customers, transporters, or vendors. The press itself has limited access; occasional interviews with users or retail workers, most of whom have good reason to avoid such interviews- or remain anonymous when they do grant them.
The record shows that police agencies have learned to make good use of this information monopoly; they are almost always the primary source of any news story about drug enforcement, trends in drug use, new smuggling techniques, etc.. Major drug stories tend to be written from a sensational standpoint - either outlining a new "menace," providing interesting details on the latest wrinkle in interdiction, or titillating with an account of the effects of new agents. As such, they both provide free advertising for illegal drugs and tend to document the need for an ever-expanding police effort.
Prohibition was undone largely because law enforcement's ability to suppress the illegal alcohol market was overwhelmed so quickly that there was no political will to fund a matching expansion of police resources. In contrast, drug prohibition as policy has become prisoner to the fact that the enforcement effort has expanded just slowly enough to be tolerable while reaching its present grotesque size, the very dimensions of which now guarantee a larger, more vociferous, well connected, and respected police chorus pleading for more money each year.
Thus, to the extent the press has become willing victims of the police information monopoly on illegal drug markets, they have facilitated growth of the futile police effort to "control" those markets. Even at this late date, they tend to applaud the latest "smashing" of a drug ring with little recognition that new actors wait in the wings and the market will continue to prosper. It has only been in the past few years that a spate of opinion pieces, most written by independent columnists, have begun to look realistically at the inevitable perennial failure of law enforcement. The best summation of this travesty is Dan Baum's terse phrase: "The politics of failure," as a subtitle of his book, "Smoke and Mirrors.
The Internet has emerged as an alternative mechanism for balancing the police/press monopoly on information about illegal drug markets. Although the primary news source in most instances continues to be a law enforcement disclosure to the working press, the Internet allows access to many different reports and interpretations of the same phenomenon. News archives with a capacity for rapid retrieval allow current claims to be compared with earlier reports; most importantly, alternative evaluations of policy are enabled and informed challenges of standard newspaper accounts are facilitated.
The past three years have seen an undeniable erosion of the press support previously expressed for drug prohibition. This has been accompanied by a string of successful medical marijuana initiatives, which- if California is any harbinger- will bring many new instances of police intransigence before the public. Whether this ferment will be enough to change policy anytime soon remains to be seen, but it is a necessary prelude to the defeat of at least a few pro-drug prohibition politicians which remains the sine qua non for radical policy change.
In the meantime, an enhanced understanding of the basis for the unplanned, but effective, Police/Press collusion on drug policy issues should help counteract its effects.
Tom O'Connell
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