Breaking the drug-crime link

Public Interest, Summer, 2003 by David Boyum, Mark A.R. Kleiman

THE American criminal justice system now spends a significant proportion of its resources enforcing the drug laws. More than 10 percent of all arrests and about 20 percent of all incarcerations involve drug law violations. (Most of the 1.5 million annual drug arrests are for simple possession, while the majority of the 325,000 people behind bars on drug charges are there for dealing.) Drug-related arrests are up 50 percent over the past 10 years, and drug-related incarceration is up 80 percent. And the burden of drug law enforcement falls especially on urban minority communities: Will Brownsberger and Anne Morrison Piehi of Harvard found that the poorest neighborhoods in Massachusetts, with a little more than 10 percent of the state's population, accounted for 57 percent of state prison commitments for drug offenses, while Peter Reuter and his colleagues at RAND estimated that nearly a third of African-American males born in the District of Columbia in the 1960s were charged with selling drugs between the age s of 18 and 24.

But advocates of drug legalization and many other critics of current drug control efforts argue the opposite. They say that drug policy, and not drug abuse, is principally responsible for the observed relationship between drugs and crime. Drug laws and their enforcement make illicit drugs more expensive. Higher drug prices increase nondrug crime because many heavy users commit crimes to finance their habits. Violent crime among dealers is even more obviously attributable to drug prohibition; when alcohol was an illicit drug, alcohol dealers settled their differences with firearms, just as cocaine dealers do today. But two liquor store owners are now no more likely to shoot one another than are two taxi drivers. Eliminate the drug laws, it is said, and most drug-related crime will also disappear.

Such vigorous enforcement of drug prohibition, while controversial, enjoys substantial support. This is partly because drug laws are seen as protecting people--especially, but not exclusively, children--from drug abuse and addiction. But it is also because drug prohibition and enforcement are widely believed to prevent burglary, robbery, assault, and other predatory crime, a view apparently borne out by the violence that surrounds much drug dealing and the high rates of drug use among active criminals. Because drug trafficking is inherently violent and because illicit drug use is a catalyst for criminal behavior, the argument goes, enforcement efforts to suppress drug selling and drug taking will tend to reduce crime.

Each of these views has an element of truth. By creating black markets, prohibition can cause crime. But so too can intoxication and addiction, which would increase if drugs were freely available. Further complicating these links between drugs and crime is the fact that the pharmacological effects of intoxication and addiction, the patterns of use, and the economics of buying and selling differ greatly across drugs. It would not be surprising if some policies were crime-reducing when applied to, say, methamphetamine but crime-increasing with respect to marijuana. And vice-versa.

Thus, the question that supporters and opponents of drug prohibition endlessly debate, "Do drugs, or drug laws, cause crime?" presents a false dichotomy. The answer to both halves of the question is "Yes." In this essay, we will try to answer a more productive question: What drug policies would work best to minimize predatory crime? The question is difficult to answer, given the complexity of the problem and the uncertainty surrounding key factual questions. A reasonable first step is to review the empirical evidence about the potential links between drugs and such predatory crimes as theft and assault.

The drugs-crime connections

The three most important causal links between drugs and crime are the behavioral effects of drug use, the urgent need of addicts for money to feed their habits, and the side-effects of illicit markets. We will examine each in turn.

Intoxication and addiction, in certain circumstances, appear to encourage careless and combative behavior. The key empirical observation here is that more crimes--and, in particular, more violent crimes--are committed under the influence of alcohol than under the influence of all illegal drugs combined. When state and federal prisoners were asked about the circumstances of the offenses that landed them in prison, 24 percent said they were under the influence of illicit drugs (but not alcohol) at the time, 30 percent cited intoxication with alcohol alone, and 17 percent named drugs and alcohol together. That alcohol, a legal and inexpensive drug, is implicated in so much crime suggests that substance abuse itself, and not just economic motivation or the perverse effects of illicit markets, can play a significant role in crime.

This connection is hardly surprising. Anything that weakens self-control and reduces foresight is likely to increase lawbreaking activities. Most crime doesn't pay, and being high is one good way to forget that fact. (Driving drunk, for example, rarely stands up to cost-benefit analysis from the drunk driver's viewpoint, yet many otherwise sensible people engage in it.) Some forms of intoxication also make certain crimes seem more rewarding, as well as making punishments seem less threatening. And most of us know people who become aggressive when drunk or high.