Obsolete Inner City Mercenaries: Collapse the Drug Market

By

Dr. Sherman N. Miller

3/29/2008

I have been working on a manuscript that offers suggestions on helping gangbangers to transition to college students. The selling of drugs is an issue that I must consider in my effort. Therefore, I am sharing the chapter that focuses attention on legalizing some drugs to take the financial incentive out of selling them.

A common scene on the television evening news is a mother crying over the murder of her child. You feel this mother’s pain because you know that this dead child will never have a full life in which he or she may have children or grandchildren.  It becomes apparent that inner city American neighborhoods are today's killing fields.  These senseless murders are excellent vehicles to keep neighborhoods in socioeconomic bondage for neighborhood people might view themselves in a hopeless situation. One might argue that living in some inner city neighborhoods with their high potential of random gunfire on the streets is tantamount be being in a drug war concentration camp or urban reservation.  

Yesteryear’s street demonstrations employed by the civil rights movement does not appear to phase today’s drug overlords who now control inner city neighborhoods. A rationale why street demonstrations do not work on the drug overlords is the demonstrators are geared towards solving civil rights problems; the drug scourge is a business problem.  Hence to fight the drug problem one needs to have a business mindset, where one is competing with one's competitor in a given marketplace.  President George W. Bush recognizes that this is an economic war. You need only read, “The President’s National Drug Control Strategy.”

“The policies and programs of the National Drug Control Strategy are guided by the fundamental insight that the illegal drug trade is a market, and both users and traffickers are affected by market dynamics. By disrupting this market, the U.S. Government seeks to undermine the ability of drug suppliers to meet, expand, and profit from drug demand. When drug supply does not fully meet drug demand, changes in drug price and purity support prevention efforts by making initiation to drug use more difficult. They also contribute to treatment efforts by eroding the abilities of users to sustain their habits.

“An increasingly diverse body of scientific evidence underscores the significance of drug price and purity to the habits of drug users.

“Youth surveys have demonstrated the strong inverse relationship between cocaine use and price. Emergency department admissions data and arrestee urinalysis results for both cocaine and heroin also reveal a strong correlation between use and price. Additional studies indicate that decreases in heroin purity and increases in heroin price are linked to increases in methadone program enrollments and dose requirements. The sensitivity of users to drug price and purity is a durable relationship that can be influenced to help achieve America’s national drug control goals” (Office of National Drug Control Policy2006).

Although the above comments offer a lot of wishful thinking, inner city neighborhood people are still confronted with the daily carnage on their streets from murders associated with the drug trade. Therefore, neighborhood people have a gauge on who is winning the drug war – it is the daily body count of inner city American youth killed in the drug war. 

The president’s strategy on fighting illegal drugs appears to overlook one of the key elements of accepting the failure of prohibition and the reintroduction of the sales of alcohol in the United States. Mark Thornton offers an insightful look at the failure of alcohol prohibition, he reports in an executive summary:

“National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33) – the ‘noble experiment’ – was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses, and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a miserable failure on all counts. The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure

“The lessons of Prohibition remain important today. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion, and gambling.

“Although consumption of alcohol fell at the beginning of Prohibition, it subsequently increased. Alcohol became more dangerous to consume; crime increased and became ‘organized’; the court and prison systems were stretched to the breaking point; and corruption of public officials was rampant. No measurable gains were made in productivity and or reduced absenteeism. Prohibition removed a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased government spending. It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangerous substances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition. Those results are documented from a variety of sources, most of which, ironically, are the work of supporters of Prohibition – most economists and social scientists supported it. Their findings make the case against Prohibition that much stronger.” (Thornton, 1991)

The impact on the murder rate going through Prohibition is seen in Figure B. It shows a significant rise in murders between 1920 and 1933 with the peak in 1933. Then the murder rate drifts back down to values compared pre-Prohibition days. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports, “Homicide rates recently declined to levels last seen in the late 1960s.” (Bureau of Justice, 2005) 
 
The problem with the data reported in Figure B is it is aggregate data taken on the entire population of the United States. However, if we look at the black male homicide rate from 1976 to 2002 we see that it is roughly 10 times the white rate. The black murder rate figures are very depressing when one considers that blacks are about 12 percent of the U.S. population. Although the black murder rate figures are distressingly high they do follow a downward slope similar to the aggregate murder rate numbers.  Nevertheless, the high black murder rate gives credence to the black mothers’ lamentation commonplace on the evening news in the late 20th and early 21st century. 

Thornton concludes in his policy analysis, “Repeal of Prohibition dramatically reduced crime, including organized crime, and corruption. Jobs were created, and new voluntary efforts, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which was begun in 1934, succeeded in helping alcoholics. Those lessons can be applied to the current crisis in drug prohibition and the problems of drug abuse. Second, the lessons of Prohibition should be used to curb the urge to prohibit. Neoprohibition of alcohol and prohibition of tobacco would result in more crime, corruption, and dangerous products and increased government control over the average citizen's life. Finally, Prohibition provides a general lesson that society can no more be successfully engineered in the United States than in the Soviet Union.
“Prohibition was supposed to be an economic and moral bonanza. Prisons and poorhouses were to be emptied, taxes cut, and social problems eliminated. Productivity was to skyrocket and absenteeism disappear. The economy was to enter a never-ending boom. That utopian outlook was shattered by the stock market crash of 1929. Prohibition did not improve productivity or reduce absenteeism. In contrast, private regulation of employees’ drinking improved productivity, reduced absenteeism, and reduced industrial accidents wherever it was tried before, during, and after Prohibition.

“In summary, Prohibition did not achieve its goals. Instead, it added to the problems it was intended to solve and supplanted other ways of addressing problems. The only beneficiaries of Prohibition were bootleggers, crime bosses, and the forces of big government  . . .”

As I ponder Thornton’s conclusion, it becomes apparent that his conclusion may aver that leaders of the war on drugs ought to consider legalizing some drugs. This legalization might be comparable to eliminating the prohibition of liquor in the 1930s.  The federal government is aggressively moving against the illicit drug industry; however, this is the $320-billion global market. The United States is the principal drug market to fight this scourge, so a legalization effort would cause a worldwide ripple effect in the global drug trade.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, offers us a feel for what might happen if the drug market collapses in the United States.  Here is what is currently going on with a significant price differential between America and Europe on illicit drug prices.

“While North America continues to represent the largest single consumer sector for drugs, cocaine seizures have been declining there since 1995. Meanwhile, the euro continues to rise against the dollar and is just one more incentive for drug traffickers to profit from a growing European drug market. Increased numbers of cocaine traffickers in particular have discovered an ideal market for increased profits by attracting a new generation of clients and generating greater volume. The use of illegal drugs, especially among prospering European youth, has increased to unprecedented levels; it is estimated that 10 million Europeans have tried cocaine at least once. In Europe, a kilogram of cocaine sells for an average of $50,000, compared to about $30,000 in the U.S. According to a 2006 Europol report, an estimated 250 tons of cocaine enter the EU annually by way of sea or air. With an ostensibly saturated North American drug market, a clearly concerned EU leadership will want to focus on concrete rather than theoretical approaches to curbing the burgeoning availability of illegal drugs in Europe before the problem becomes unmanageable. As use grows, and profits reach record levels, Europe could soon be witnessing the same kind of open warfare between local cartels and police forces that is now being seen in such Latin American countries as Mexico and Colombia” (Council on, 2007).

It would be easy to shun the recommendations inherent in the reports above but we need only look at the legalization of various forms of gambling across the nation to understand the impact of taking criminals out of inner city neighborhoods and lessening the incentive to make new ones. As a child growing up in Wilmington, Delaware in the late 1940s and 1950s, it was common for folks to know where the number bank was and who wrote the numbers. Some people played on his or her number man every chance available. Every once in a while somebody would hit. I recall, if they played a dollar the winning would be $500. The aim was to pick three members correctly. 
One time when I was at a barbershop, I saw a childhood friend about to leave after getting a haircut. I had been going to the same barber for many years, so the barber shared that my friend had checked himself out of a hospital in order to pick up the numbers on his route. As best I could understand, my friend had a life-threatening illness that he was ignoring in order to pick up the numbers on his route.

Today, mega million-dollar lotteries such as Powerball offer the opportunity to win at least millions with the same $1 bet placed in yesteryear. There are also state lotteries, where people can place bets at convenience stores. The money from the lotteries is purportedly going to good social causes. However, what underpins many legalized lotteries is the acceptance that people will gamble with legal or illegal operations. By making lotteries legal, the government can now share in the huge profits that were being made in this industry.

Some states have gone the next level by allowing casinos to open. These casinos take huge sums of money that would have gone to yesterday’s gangsters. The State of Delaware casinos are mostly slot machine operations. Delaware appears to have cherry picked the gambling activities and decided on one-arm-bandits. If one wishes to do big-time gambling, it is a short drive to Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Perhaps there is a need for the federal government to reassess its stance against any drug legalization. The federal government should consider what drugs would make sense to legalize and control with the goal to drop the street value of these drugs to where it makes little business sense for gangsters to continue to control inner city poor neighborhoods. Furthermore, one might be able to buy these legal drugs through convenience stores or drugstores, depending on what drug is purchased. Corporations might control the proliferation of the use of legal drugs amongst their employees by aggressively enforcing policies that they already may have on their books against excessive use of intoxicants. The underpinning goal here is to defrock the drug pusher man as a role model of success for today’s and tomorrow’s inner city youth.

As a Republican black conservative, it is difficult for me to recommend legalizing any drug. However, I watch the lamentation of inner city mothers on the evening news making it difficult for me to keep my head buried in the sand and not acknowledge the loss of their precious children. It becomes especially troublesome, if I allow my ideology to supersede what the facts clearly suggest. It would be disingenuous for political officials at the highest level not to accept that we are currently losing the war against drugs in inner city America. If they need any proof that we are not winning, they need only to look at the combined daily murder reports in major cities across the United States that appears as domestic war casualties. I anticipate being taken to the woodshed for even suggesting the legalization of any drugs. On the other hand, if I am able to kindle the debate that frees up in inner city American children to return to studying in school versus chasing get-rich-quick schemes, then I’m willing to take the media heat.

I’m a firm believer that all children should be able to play in their own neighborhood without worrying about getting killed or injured in a shootout between rival gangs over some drug turf. Senior citizens should be able to sit out front of their homes or engage in activities within their house without becoming collateral damage in a drive-by shooting between rival gangs. While I have a lot of faith that the government is mounting a Herculean effort in interdicting the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, I only ask that decision-makers visit violence-laden neighborhoods where street deaths are common occurrence to ask these people if they are against legalization of some drugs that may curtail the daily carnage. In Philadelphia on July 13, 2007, the morning television news caption read, “City in Crisis” there were three separate murders in one night. Surely Philadelphia and other big cities are looking for a new direction in the war on drugs to stop the nightly carnage.