Drugs and crime: relationship and impacts

Criminal Justice - Drugs & Crime

DRUGS and CRIME

The illicit use of narcotics generates a tremendous amount of crime in the United States, ranging from petty street crimes to serious trafficking and violence, including murder associated with the illegal black market. In this respect, there is a link between drug use and crime; however, in other respects, this association is deceiving because it results more from the effect of restrictive anti-drug legislation rather than to anything directly attributable to drug use in and of itself.

The Relationship Between Drugs and Serious Crime and the Lesson of Prohibition:

From 1920 until 1933, alcohol sales and consumption were prohibited throughout the United States by federal law. To meet the continuing desire of the public for alcohol, numerous criminal enterprises emerged to provide alcohol in illegal speakeasies in conjunction with rampant political corruption in the form of payoffs from criminals to politicians willing to overlook their profiting from this vice. By 1933, public resistance to adhere to legal prohibitions restricting alcohol and so exceeded the reasonable capacity of law enforcement to enforce that the federal restriction was repealed relegating the issue to state legislation instead.

The illegal trade in alcohol proved so profitable that it financed the largest criminal syndicate in the history of the country, which eventually grew to wield profound influence throughout many major metropolitan areas including New York and Chicago in particular. By the 1970's a significant percentage of all construction expenses incurred in connection with major infrastructure construction and other industries like commercial waste transport and interstate trucking were largely controlled by the same criminal enterprises that grew out of the Prohibition era.

In many respects, contemporary legislation of illicit narcotics is analogous to alcohol prohibition in that the illegal status of narcotics provides a vacuum filled all too eagerly by criminal enterprises. In principle, narcotics could be regulated, taxed, and controlled by government authorities in exactly the same manner as alcohol and tobacco.

Instead, current U.S. law invests billions of dollars annually attempting to prevent and prosecute illicit drug use and sales.

Conclusion:

Undoubtedly, illegal drug use in the U.S. is associated with a significant amount of crime including very serious crimes. However, much of the crime generated by illicit narcotics legislation prohibiting their unauthorized use. Just as Prohibition-era alcohol legislation presented an opportunity for criminal enterprises to profit by filling a need through an illicit black market, contemporary drug laws provide the identical opportunity in the case of illicit drug trade and distribution.