Although the war in the Persian Gulf is over, the war bac home is escalating. The number of murders is breaking records in urban areas nationwide. Indeed, during the 100-hour ground war against Iraq, more Americans were gunned down on the streets of our cities than on the battlefield.
New figures last week showed increases from 1989 to 1990 in the number of murders in nine of the nation's ten largest cities.
Many blame the growing murder rate on a "culture of violence" fueled by greater firepower, as top-of-the-line weapons have increasingly become part of the urban landscape. But part of the violence may be the deadly residue of a stagnating illegal drug market. Thus, the good news about declining national drug use may in fact be bad news about drug-related violence.
Although drug statistics are hotly contested, most experts agree that the drug market boom is over and that overall drug consumption patterns are down.
The latest figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), although rough estimates at best, indicate this general trend. While there has been little success in lowering hard-core addiction, the crack market has stagnated (at about 500,000 users over the past two years), and casual use of any illicit drugs (the vast majority of the market) has dropped significantly, from 23 million in 1985 to 12.9 million in 1990. Casual use of cocaine has declined even more sharply, by 72 percent from 1985 to 1990.
With the drug market declining, a basic economic principle comes into play: When markets shrink, competition intensifies. When the market is illegal, competition is -- literally -- cutthroat. Force, not law, prevails as drug entrepreneurs compete by shooting each other rather than suing each other.
The greater the competition in the drug market, the greater the violence. The consequence is the kind of drug violence that is plaguing urban areas across the country.
The evolution of the drug market helps explain our present predicament.
Over the last decade, the growth of cocaine, and its cheap derivative, crack, fueled the underground drug trade. Some estimate the size of the U.S. drug market to be as high as $100 billion annually -- more than twice what the country spends on imported oil.
One consequence of this boom was the mobilization of a massive labor force in the 1980s to service the nation's seemingly unquenchable thirst for drugs. In cities such as Washington, New York and Los Angeles, where legal employment opportunities have been scarce, this meant primarily low-income minority youths who found an alternative outlet for their entrepreneurial talents in the expanding drug business.
The employment boom in the drug trade coincided with severe underemployment and unemployment in the legal economy. In hundreds of cities, "blue-collar industries that once constituted the urban economic backbone and provided entry-level employment opportunities for lesser educated residents either vanished or relocated elsewhere," says John Kassarda, director of the Center for Competitiveness and Employment Growth at the University of North Carolina. "With no prospect for upward mobility in the mainstream economy," he notes, "unskilled and uneducated black youth have sought access to a surrogate economy in which there is mobility -- the illicit and exploding underground drug economy."
But while the drug market has declined in recent years, the number of young drug-selling entrepreneurs has not. The tragic but logical result is brutal competition over smaller and smaller pieces of a shrinking pie. Thus, "turf wars" (battles for market shares) intensify, reflected in high numbers of drug-related homicides. These bitter economic realities in the drug market -- coupled by the easy availability of handguns -- has produced an explosive formula for mounting urban violence.
Many law enforcement officials confirm this trend. "Now, with a shrinking [drug] market, they [dealers] have to compete aggressively," notes Stephen Rickman, director of statistics analysis for the office of Criminal Justice Plans and Analysis. "That sparks a certain level of violence.
Also, the decline of the drug market helps fuel non-drug-related violence. According to Lawrence Sherman, president of the Crime Control Institute, a Washington think tank, "As kids under 18 got involved in drug dealing, they got armed. Even if drug dealing declines, they still have the guns. Once the guns have been stockpiled, you can expect they will be used in all kinds of disputes."
The killings will only increase as the drug economy suffers from the shocks of the post-boom period. To make matters worse, as the country slips deeper into a recession, legal alternatives are .. even more scarce. Despite the extreme occupational hazards of street dealing, the potential financial rewards of the drug trade will continue to attract new recruits.
The implications for President Bush's national drug control strategy are sobering: the greater the stagnation in the drug market, the greater the violence. There is a market logic here that surely the Bush administration should understand. Unfortunately, the administration's response has been to try to simply prosecute its way out of this dilemma through tougher laws and more jails.
The nation's prison population has more than doubled since 1980, with the cost of imprisoning or jailing more than a million Americans estimated to be over $21 billion annually. The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with prison construction the nation's only remaining real estate boom. The single biggest cause of this skyrocketing prison population is drug-related arrests. In Washington D.C., for example, drug-related offenses comprise about half of all incarcerations.
The number of drug offenders in our already-overflowing federal prisons has doubled since 1988, and now accounts for more than half of the federal prison population. These figures "are astounding -- what they show is that the war on drugs is eating up the criminal justice system," says Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. "Important types of crimes are being ignored or disregarded in an effort to prosecute drug cases."
Minority youths have been the hardest hit. According to the Sentencing Project, one out of four young black males is in jail or under court supervision.
This lock-em-up approach to drug control is expected to continue under the direction of new drug czar Bob Martinez, the former governor of Florida, who has the dubious distinction of having doubled Florida's prison capacity and given the state the highest incarceration rate in the country.
His appointment by the president to lead the nation's anti-drug fight reflects a continued unwillingness to try alternative approaches. Thus, the need for a major restructuring of the overwhelmed criminal justice system is discussed but little is done. The death penalty is eagerly promoted, even though there is no indication that it deters crime. Most importantly, serious new efforts to reverse urban decay and promote economic alternatives to the drug trade are painfully absent.
Without these alternatives, street dealers will continue to kill each other in competition over a shrinking market. Millions of city residents will continue to live in fear as the violence escalates. Bystanders will be caught in the cross-fire.
Everyone will continue to condemn the killings. But if the bloodshed is to stop, the first step is to recognize that current policy is simply not working. It does not even recognize how declining consumption is actually increasing urban violence. This violent economic logic of the drug market must be acknowledged, confronted and broken.
Law enforcement does have an important role to play, especially in the form of innovative community policing strategies. But it must not continue to serve as a substitute for larger reforms.
Tough new gun control legislation is also crucial and long overdue.
Further, proposals to decriminalize drugs deserve critical examination as part of an expanded policy debate. They will not solve the problems of use or abuse, but we need to see whether they make sense as part of an alternative drug strategy.
But policy debates about law enforcement, gun control and decriminalization will remain inadequate unless we are also willing to initiate a genuine war on poverty that mends the worsening urban social and economic conditions that provide fertile ground for the drug trade.
Ultimately, regardless of how many new policemen are hired and prisons are built, drug dealers cannot "just say no" to drugs unless they have something to say "yes" to, such as decent jobs and decent schools.
Unless we can escape from the straitjacket of our current drug strategy and begin to debate and implement genuine alternatives, the vicious logic of the drug trade -- and the escalating violence it stimulates -- will persist.
Investing in our cities through programs that create employment, provide job training, and build new and better schools would obviously cost billions. But unless we devote the kind of resources to urban poverty that we so willingly poured into the Persian Gulf war, the epidemic of violence on our streets at home will persist. And the billions being spent on the current drug war will absorb our scarce tax dollars in the futile search for a quick fix.
Peter Andreas is a research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. Kenneth Sharpe is professor of political science at Swarthmore College.