Radley Balko and other libertarians repeatedly make maudlin appeals bemoaning the supposed injustices of long prison sentences and rough police tactics used against drug dealers.
But the problem with libertarians’ abstract appeals to liberty in this case is that people with real experience with drugs and drug dealers know two things that libertarians dismiss all-too-casually: (1) drugs–particularly hard drugs like cocaine, meth, and heroin–often make good people do bad things, and (2) drug dealers are generally violent, deceitful, selfish, and antisocial people that harm their communities.
Drugs are uniquely bad in this regard. Other criminal types of behavior–auto theft, white collar crime, shop lifting, tax evasion–do not turn their purveyors into murderous, rampaging psychopaths. Yet violence and the drug trade go hand and hand. One needn’t look very far to find evidence that drug dealers are more violent than law-abiding people, often remarkably so.
In response, the libertarians would tell us that these people wouldn’t be violent, but for the criminalization of drugs. This doesn’t make logical sense. Other things are illegal, and other people commit crimes, yet they do not become violent. Further, there is evidence that the intensification of the drug war and the increased use of mandatory sentences for drug offenses were significant factors in the decade-long drop in violent crime during the 1990s. Surely some of the people being locked up on drug offenses would have committed violent offenses that are much harder to detect and prove than something like drug possession.
In other words, the drug laws are a large and somewhat overinclusive net in which so many pathological and anti-social people can be collected. In this milieu, the police, instead of having to investigate harder-to-prosecute violent crime offenses, can do a lot to stop violent crime by arresting and prosecuting drug offenders.
Until libertarians recognize that drug dealers are not simply good people doing something technically illegal, but rather bad peope exhibiting one of several criminal tendencies when they deal drugs, their maudlin attempts to “humanize” drug dealers and reduce penalties for drug dealing will be seen as naive and a bit offensive to most Americans, particularly inner-city and poorer Americans who must live among these predatory people.
17 Dec 2006 at 10:06 pm
Lord knows how those liquor store and 7-11 clerks are such violent, deceitful, evil people. All in a day’s work when dealing drugs, it seems.
Drugs are profitable, and thus when made illegal they will naturally attract a criminal element. And those that are the most heinous and ruthless will rise to the top, making their own law in the black market. When alcohol was illegal, the same types of criminals that today push cocaine were dealing in bathtub gin. But when that drug became legal, they didn’t stick with the alcohol trade. They went to the next remaining option. Why? Because there is (to them) security in the black market when you’re the one making the rules. But the other likely products just don’t pull in the money like drugs do.
17 Dec 2006 at 11:26 pm
The mafia in NYC used to deal in such contraband rackets as the garment trade, construction, sanitation services, etc. Scumbags will always find a way to make money. The drug laws help us easily identify who they are and lock them up so they don’t resort to the things we’ve seen in other parts of the world that are even more socially damaging, such as the kidnnapping trade of Iraq and Latin America or the prostitution rings of Russia and East Asia.
The drug laws both allow us easily to identify the bad guys and likely steer them away from other more damaging trades. Finally, they probably stop at least some people from using drugs or using them as much as they might if they were completey legal.
18 Dec 2006 at 3:03 pm
So, your rationale for keeping drugs illegal is that it works like in a flypaper fashion to attract bad people, and that the drug trade causes less damage than other options?
Considering the sheer size and breadth of the destruction wreaked by the drug war, I simply don’t think it’s credible to say “better this than prostitution.” And not only has the first rationale been found wanting in that this so-called easy identification of bad guys hasn’t done much to stop the drug trade, but the premise of it completely divorces the law from the morality and individual rights that the law was created to enforce. Why not make adultery illegal, at that rate? That’s a good way to identify scumbags as well.
18 Dec 2006 at 3:24 pm
Dear sir, I surely you know people who have used hard drugs and you may you have known a person who sold drugs. I suspect your impression of such people was that neither were evil nor dangerous.
Indeed, the 80s was well known for white collar use of cocaine. I believe that there are no facts supporting the notion that these folks were some how evil or dangerous.
The problem was and always will be, that some people choose to do evil and some of those folks will choose to do drugs, hire prostitutes, gamble, or otherwise engage in activity that some frown upon. The problem is not the drugs, it is the people. It is just in our society it is easier or more politically correct to blame it on what at most is a symptom than call a person out.
Guns do not kill people and drugs do not make people bad. People kill people, and people are born with original sin. People are born bad and must choose to be good. Such is the nature of free will and our struggle to overcome our animal nature.
As for the decrease in crime, there is a lot to say about how abortion has curbed crime. Neither you nor I support abortion, so just because you suppose crime has decreased because of increased punishment for drug crimes, it does not follow that this is the right choice.
18 Dec 2006 at 3:44 pm
Clearly some people can do drugs recreatinoally, even cocaine. That said, there are many cocaine junkies, whether on the streets or otherwise. Any episode of cops shows what happens when this gets a grip on someone; even good people with good responsible lives can lose it. A habit’s a hard thing to feed for most people. I don’t think it totally destroys individual culpability, but I do think it reduces the capacity for self-control, at least among addicts. And I think the law should treat users and dealers differently for that reason.
Anyway, just because there are some nice drug dealers and functional junkies doesn’t make the Crips and Bloods a figment of my imagination.
It may still arguably be more costly to have a drug war than not to have one. But I wish people would be a little more hard-headed about the character of the average dealer.
18 Dec 2006 at 9:52 pm
Fine. The “average drug dealer” is an a-hole. So is the average pimp, lawyer, and golf club manager.
Let’s just agree that the merits of the drug war shouldn’t rest on the character of the drug dealers, okay?
18 Dec 2006 at 10:13 pm
No doubt, the average drug dealer is not a good guy. Conversely, the average clerk at say the local grocery store where they sell cigarettes, beer, wine, and hard liquor (none of these can be sold in my county, but that is another issue) is a good enough chap. I suspect the same type of people would be selling marijuana, cocaine, etc. if the law so allowed.
Yes, some people have addiction problems. However, note that cigarettes are the most addictive of the drugs and alcohol is the only drug withdrawal from which can physically kill you. Heroine withdraw will not literally kill you, it instead drives some to commit suicide. Then you have the whole numbers issues. These drugs are used by and harm more people by a far far far larger amount than all the illegal drugs combined. The press misleads us all the time when they talk about how horrible the illegal drug problem is.
Crips and bloods are not a figment of your imagination, but their existence is not predicated upon drugs. With or without drugs, the Bloods and Crips will exist, just as terrorist leaders exist in Muslim nations. It is always easier to by association feel better about yourself by blaming outsiders than to accept personal responsibility for ones own plight. Thus gangs, whether they be crips and bloods, Nazis, skin heads, or Muslim terrorist will always exists and they will always pray on the weak.
19 Dec 2006 at 12:02 am
Let me raise my points as dispassionately as possible.
First, I think libertarians do themselves and their argument a disservice by retreating into maudling sentimental appeals (viz., these people are just exercising their natural liberty and trying to earn a living) and, at the other extreme, by making deracinated abstract appeals to liberty (viz., this is state coercion against voluntary transactions and victimless crimes). A sociopath’s “human rights” are of little concern to most of us, because we know he’ll violate our property and liberty rights if given the chance. It’s not like drug dealers’ love of liberty extends to the liberty of other drug dealers; he uses private violence against most of them, both to enforce debts but also to preserve a monopoly. Drug dealers mainly are both bad and unsympathetic, and thus the maudlin appeals to their plight and the abstract appeals to their human rights both do and should fall on deaf ears. It’s no use worrying about the human rights of someone who is a natural predator.
The best argument for drug decriminalization goes something along the lines of Conservatarian’s argument: other goods that had certain harmful health effects and addictive qualities created and strengthened criminal networks, created incentives for violence to preserve monopoly profits when they were prohibited, and today they create less social harm because they have been made legal. The criminals have been taken out of the equation.
Now we all know that alcohol, once illegal, is legal today. And it’s also true that much of the violence we today assoicate with criminal drug gangs was once associated with criminal alcohol gangs under prohibition. That said, if both were made legal, I doubt the criminal drug dealers would all become model citizens. Many of the prohibition rum-rummers moved into other enterprises . . . look at the mob movement into the garment trade and city contracts in the Northeast.
As in the case of hte mob, the drug gangs would persist and have to find other criminal activity to do. I propose that this other activity would be more socially harmful and also, in many cases, harder to detect than the current drug racket. The drug laws make it easier to sort out the habitual criminals (many of whom are also violent and antisocial) from the rest of us. It’s harder to prove rape, kidnapping, and murder than it is to prove the posession of large quantities of drugs. And other enterprises, unlike drugs, depend upon corruption and intimidation to a greater extent than the drug trade and are arguably more harmful than drug networks.
I also think the major premise that ending prohibition was all good is somewhat mistaken. Alcohol today causes a great many evils, from drunk driving deaths to the social problems that flow from alcoholism. These problems may not be as bad as the evils of prohibition, and they do not excuse individual abuses of alcohol for their culpability, but if alcohol were not around at all, it’s at least arguable that the entire society would be better off. (I don’t mean prohibited, just nonexistent.)
And since less alcohol would be consumed if it were illegal–simple economics, it would simply be more costly–then it’s just a question of weighting the social costs and benefits of prohibition to determine if it makes sense to prohibit it.
My point is that optimally there is some easy-to-detect crime that we want to channel criminals into that does relatively little damage to the rest of society’s institutions, is easy to detect, and thus by being made illegal allows us to sort out the dirtbags among us and lock them up for a long time, while also reducing what is undeniably a harmful, self-destructive activity.
PS As for the nice chap selling cigarettes and alcohol, that’s usually true . . . except for that schmuck at the Piggly Wiggly. ; )
19 Dec 2006 at 1:12 am
What do you expect from a place called Piggly Wiggly. That is like being in Philadelphia and going to WaWa and expecting good service or the gas station on 60th Street in Chicago just beyond the law school.
19 Dec 2006 at 7:41 am
If drug-dealing were so “easy-to-detect” then our drug interdiction efforts wouldn’t be such a failure, and drug use wouldn’t be so prevalent in our society. It’s not like drug use enjoys a social stigma, either. If someone breaks out a doobie at a party, it’s not like people are tripping over themselves trying to call the cops about it.
I don’t think we’d be better off without alcohol. After all, Ben Franklin noted that alcohol was proof “that God loves us.” We would probably be better off without meth, but the drug war fuels the creation of things like meth. Once an entire class of drugs is made illegal, the distinctions between them fade. Marijuana legalization might make more people smoke pot, but it also may make them less likely to move to harder drugs, too.
I still strongly disagree with the premise that the drug war causes fewer social ills than alternatives. Between the unprecedented erosion of 4th Amendment liberties and the social destruction caused by the unregulated distribution and use of drugs, I don’t think any other option can scarcely compare. Gambling, prostitution, protection rackets, kidnapping…nothing can come close to the sheer size and reach of drugs. I just don’t see it.
20 Dec 2006 at 5:35 pm
This reminds me of a point that Ziel (of Your Lying Eyes) made: drug laws provide a good and easy way to get criminally-minded blacks and Latinos (and a few lower-calss whites) off the street before they get to the point of committing violent crime.
Which is why white-collar drug use is somewhat more tolerated.
20 Dec 2006 at 7:13 pm
Chris Roach is right in my view, but he overlooks one of the best arguments of the liberatarians, to whit, that drug dealers resort to “self-help” for protection and settling disputes more often than they otherwise would because legitimate help is unavailable from law-enforcement. That said, maybe more folks would buy his argument if he said drug dealers are more like drunks than they are like people who drink wine because it goes with certain foods or who are legitimate social drinkers. At the levels typically consumed, even pot is considerably more intoxicating in terms of it’s effects on consciousness than that devil al-quhol, and it doesn’t have thousands of years of socially acceptable use backing it up. It’s not as though many odes were sung to the lotus eaters even back in the day. There are good reasons for that.
But what do I know? According to Mr. Markels, I’m evil, or at least deucedly annoying just like your average drug dealer, since I’m “an average lawyer”.
Kudos all. That’s the way I see it, anyways!
20 Dec 2006 at 7:29 pm
I suspect allowing state troopers the freedom to completely search any cars they stop for any traffic violation would reduce crime as well. It would be really only be a minor inconvenience for most law abiding citizens. Come to think of it, on balance, I would probably support that amendment.
Actually, I’m becoming somewhat skeptical about whether legalization would actually reduce violent crime. While very cheap crack or heroin might mollify an otherwise violent person (both by reducing the need to steal and by cooling his jets in a heroin coma), one always hears we should legalize and “tax” drugs. I’d bet drugs would gradually be as expensive as the untaxed variety today. Having said that, while I’m not thrilled with Uncle Sam getting richer, the shift of profits from drug lords and their minions to shareholders would be a huge societal benefit.
21 Dec 2006 at 4:33 pm
Honza, are you aware of anyone, while stoned, beating his wife, or driving his car at a dangerously high rate of speed. I am not. Generally, seems that those who are stoned are more easy going and tend to drive their cars at ridiculously low speeds. I think I prefer stoners over drunks any day.