Does cheap cocaine make us safer?

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INCENTIVES matter, as economists and other behavioural scientists have been trying to drive into our heads for decades now, and Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones has a great piece at the Atlantic's Cities blog amassing the evidence that the remarkable drop in crime rates in America since the mid-1990s is largely due to the plummeting price of cocaine. This makes profit rates for coke dealers insufficient to warrant violent efforts to control territory.

Once the margin of profit for dealing small amounts of crack cocaine disappeared, being part of the drug trade was no longer worth the persistent threat of violence or the stiff criminal penalties. A 70 percent drop in cocaine prices like the one that occurred in the mid 1990s combined with competition from decentralized sources for methamphetamines and prescription narcotics would completely eliminate the minimum wage drug dealer as a viable profession.

The same goes for turf wars, which [sociologist Sudhir] Venkatesh saw as the source of the majority of inner-city violence. He saw the life of a drug dealer as relatively violence-free up until territory conflicts with other gangs ensued. Without the high value of cocaine as a commodity, the incentive for protracted gang wars would dwindle as well as eliminate the economy for the illegal weapons, drive-by shootings, and mercenary “warriors” needed to help defend prime dealing locations. Without profit to fight over, Vankatesh thought that “gang violence would likely return to pre-crack levels.”​

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/crime-and-drugs

 

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Allow me a tangential mini-rant: From the comments section:

nschomer Nov 28th 2011 18:15 GMT
@New Conservative

"A drop in homicides is wonderful, but how much is that outweighed (if at all) by an increase in drug use? Does less homicides mean more overdoses due to affordable hard drugs?"

Who cares? A homicide is a crime committed by one person upon another, and so in the realm of something which government can/should do something about, drug overdoses are a result of personal stupidity, and improve the gene pool.

How is it that intelligent people continue to make this mistake? The "gene pool" is affected by people's breeding behavior. Risky behavior is correlated with more sex, and consequently more offspring. If the preponderance of fatal overdoses were pre-sexual children, then perhaps that argument would hold water. But those who are overdosing are actually doing a lot of baby-making beforehand.

 

[scureto1]

Haha nice catch. I would have already considered that comment to be moronic anyway, but you add a whole new angle by which to view his or her stupidity!

Interesting premise to the article - it is actually very intuitive and almost seems like a "Duh!" idea once you think about it, but it is very nice to have that sort of information backed up by sound data. Its just too bad policymakers and a dangerously large proportion of their constituents ignored any data that doesn't support what they already believe.

We have numerous sources of data that show us that the criminalization/decriminalization of drugs has very little to do with the rate of drug use in a country, and even less to do with the rate of drug ADDICTION in the country. There is also data that shows that the only crime (non-drug crime) commonly associated with drug use comes from two main sources: gang/cartel based violence over selling territory, and addicts who are unable to maintain their dose due to financial or drug supply issues.

Now here is data that demonstrates that the 2nd type of crime is reduced significantly when cocaine prices are low. I don't think there is data yet about the first kind, but I think it is obvious to any thinking person that legalization, even a half-ass, heavily-regulated, red-tapey version of legalization, would decimate the first type of crime.

Yet because most policymakers and voters are NOT thinking people, that idea doesn't even have the beginnings of a foothold in the U.S. Only marijuana has a foothold, because most people won't go any farther in their analysis than seeing that some people who use the "harder" drugs sometimes get hurt by them. They completely ignore how much worse the hurt is made for the users (AND the non-users!) by the criminalization of the drugs.

That's enough of the Adderall-fueled ranting I think...