Laura and gangs don’t mix
First Lady Laura Bush is leading a new initiative “to help America’s youth overcome the danger of gang influence and involvement,” and I can’t think of a worse person to head it up. She’s a white upperclass aristocrat – indeed the poster child for such people – who knows little about gangs herself and who will carry little persuasive authority among gang members. Here’s the First Lady’s home page, which is currently devoted to this initiative. There the current picture depicts Laura Bush sitting upright and proper at a freshly decorated Boys and Girls Club. There she helped kids “share ideas about respect and love.” Gag me.
Michelle Malkin takes the First Lady to task in her latest column, and I agree with Malkin’s conclusion but for different reasons. The kind of compassion and leadership-through-example that Laura Bush is attempting to offer is helpful, but she’s not the ideal person to do it. Instead potential gang members need someone similar to Coach Carter, who was recently played by Samuel L. Jackson in a widescreen film.
But Laura isn’t setting out to transform gangs alone; she’s armed with her husband’s limitless pocket book. The President proposed a three-year, $150-million initiative “to help youth at risk of gang influence and involvement.” After all, that’s the Bush philosophy – you demostrate the importance of an issue by how much you spend on it. Laura would do us all a favor by saving the tax dollars and leaving the gang member conversions to those in a better position to make meaningful changes.
12 Responses to “Laura and gangs don’t mix”
I can’t help but point out that decriminalizing drugs would likely end the gang problem as we know it.
I wonder what would happen to inner-city gangs if drugs were legal. I don’t know that they’d disappear — but their sources of revenue would. You don’t see many inner-city kids on the street selling alcohol.
I disagree that legalizing drugs in inself would do much of anything to reduce the problems associated with poverty, but who knows.
The drug war has certainly made sure that crime pays a lot more than it would otherwise. Maybe with crime out of the way as a viable option option to make a living, we’d see more inner-city youth looking for on legal ways to earn money.
On a related note, it was kinda funny to read one paragraph in Malkin’s article:
“According to Siskiyou County Sheriff Rick Riggins, MS-13 paraphernalia and weaponry have been discovered deep on federal forest land in northern California, where Latino gangs have established massive marijuana-growing operations.”
Back in prohibition times, the paragraph might have read “… massive grape-growing operations.” Ohhhhhh, scary!
In a black-humor way, it’s truly hilarious that basic farming can be a nefarious, frightening activity all over the world thanks to U.S. drug policy. From poppies to marijuana to coca, it’s a criminal offense to stick a seed in the grownd and let it grow.
Of course, they’re also the most profitable crops by far, so small farmers face perverse incentives — compete with massive growing operations (and thus starve) producing a commodity, or risk arrest by growing a high-margin crop the big farms won’t risk.
Given how imprisonment for drug possession has broken up so many families and disrupted their sources of income, one could easily argue that the war on drugs has impoverished America’s inner cities.
Legalizing or at the very least decriminalizing most recreational drugs might not eliminate youth gangs, but it would certainly remove the powerful inducements drug vendors now have toward private, gang-oriented violence: The “good guys” (law-abiding marijuana and cocaine sellers) would simply call the cops when things turned violent–This is exactly as everyone else now does. They wouldn’t need to go to gangs for protection, and the market for the gangs’ violence would be sharply reduced.
I understand, incidentally, that at one time youth gangs WEREN’T always involved in drugs. Sometimes they just hung out on street corners, played basketball… or even got involved in politics. The urban youth culture of the first half of the 20th century was a radically different creature from the one we have today (it even helped foster, incredibly enough, the Boy Scouts), and I suspect that once again, the war on drugs is to blame for the decay.
I am very skeptical of the idea that legalizing drugs would significantly reduce crime. For that to even have a chance of working, you’d have to make everything including crack and meth as easily available as alcohol, and I shudder to think of the toll that would have on society. I daresay it would outweigh the benefit gained even if all drug-related crime went away.
My suspicion is that those who turn to the drug trade for the money will find some other illegal activity to profit from. Car theft, video and software piracy, prostitution…any or all of these illegal activities might increase.
Eric, I think your point of view assumes that people commit crimes because they like to commit crime, not because it’s an opportunity that is more valueable in terms of risk/reward than legal opportunities they have available.
Once drugs aren’t illegal, and the market has disappeared, do you really think that drug dealers are going to say “damn … now I can’t break the law that way anymore. What other laws can I break?”
The reason drug dealing is rampant is not because drug dealers like to break the law, but because drug dealing is *incredibly profitable.*
As for the other possible crimes they’d turn to instead, none of them has the low-risk, high-return appeal of drug dealing. And the demand is far lower for all of them.
What other criminal activity can earn and inner-city kid with no education a *predictable* income of several hundred to several thousand dollars a day? These kids will generally look at other types of crime and say “no way — that’s too hard, and there’s not enough money in it.”
Software piracy is nowhere near as profitable as drug dealing — and it has huge barriers to entry, where drug dealing can be accomplished with no education and no equipment. Plus, anyone who wants pirated software can download it for free via the peer-to-peer networks.
Car theft has huge barriers to entry. First, the demand for stolen cars is nothing like the demand for drugs. Car thieves can only sell stolen cars to particular buyers, who themselves are heavily targeted by law enforcement. A drug dealer can just sell drugs to acquaintences, and the customers have less risk than the dealer.
Prostitution — again, not a growth market. No way thousands of drug dealers are going to turn into pimps.
The bottom line is, the drug laws have created a HUGE black market with MASSIVE demand for the criminal activity of drug dealing.
There are literally millions of people out there saying “I’ll pay someone to get me illegal drugs.” If the drug laws disappeared, the opportunity for profit from crime in generaly would drop tremendously.
And as a believer in market economics, you should know what that means — if demand for criminal activity drops, prices (i.e. rewards) for criminal activity drop as well. As demand drops, supply drops, too.
Of course, legalization would also be a sad day for the private multi-multi-billion-dollar prison industry in this country. Some law-abiding people actually profit from having crime pay.
Eric, I think your point of view assumes that people commit crimes because they like to commit crime
Wrong again, my dear troll. I clearly said that drug dealers would “find some other illegal activity to profit from.” Drug dealing may be the most profitable activity, but if some other racket is still more profitable than any legal job the drug dealer is qualified for, he or she may very well choose the other illegal activity. After all, we’re not talking about entirely rational actors here. How many players in the illict drug trade live to enjoy a comfortable retirement?
It is entirely possible that gang problems would decrease measurably, even in the long term, if crack and meth were legalized. But given the huge public health problem that would be a virtual certainty, I find drug legalization to be mostly a faith-based argument.
Eric, calling me a troll when I simply disagree with you is obnoxious. Considering the support I’ve provided ITA and Josh’s other sites, as well as plenty of word-of-mouth endorsements I pass out about you guys, it’s also counterproductive if you want a diverse discussion, which I thought was the spirit of ITA.
“After all, we’re not talking about entirely rational actors here. How many players in the illict drug trade live to enjoy a comfortable retirement?”
Oh stop it — they are completely rational. It’s drug laws that are irrational.
The type of person who becomes a drug dealer is not the type of person who’s going to have a comfortable retirement anyway. People become drug dealers/producers because their other options have disappeared. Farmers in Kentucky become pot growers because they can’t grow anything else for a profit, and the wife and kids gotta eat, not because they’re irrational.
You, who are lucky enough to have a shot at a comfortable retirement, see the illegal trade as irrational for you. For me, it is also irrational. But it’s completely rational for millions in this country.
If I had no education, no health care, and a felony conviction on my record, for example, it would be completely rational to become a drug dealer.
I couldn’t get a decent-paying job because no one will hire me, an ex-con. Even if I DO get a job, it’ll never have retirement benefits, and will never pay more than a living wage.
At worst, I get free room and board in jail if I get caught dealing. At best, I actually make decent money, an option I’ll never have as a private citizen again.
And as more and more drug posession crimes become felonies, we create an ever-growing population of non-violent people in exactly this situation, once they’ve finished their initial sentences. It’s a system that feeds itself — the users are eventually incented to become dealers. It makes it rational to commit crimes, because crime pays and there are no better options.
I believe Eric is also mistaken when he claims that we would have to legalize all drugs before seeing any benefits from legalization. Legalizing even some drugs would have immediate benefits–Many people, for instance, only want to smoke marijuana, and are uninterested in the rest. These people would no longer have to resort to criminal networks to get what they want, and there would be a marginal decrease in the level of a commerce whose only method of protection lies in extralegal violence.
Legalize a few well-chosen substances, and the rest may come to lack even sufficient distribution channels to be serious problems. After all, even a drug business requires periodic reinvestments, and if the capital is lacking, the business collapses.
In this light, I would start with marijuana, both because it is the most widely-used illegal drug and because its effects are easily the mildest. Add to this the fact that marijuana is already a major cash crop in many states, and the case seems self-evident to me.
Eric, calling me a troll when I simply disagree with you is obnoxious.
Wow. Aaron the troll is calling me obnoxious. You can cut that irony with a machete.
No, Aaron, the authors and polite commenters here consider you a troll because you do trollish things such as distort people’s arguments into straw men and rely on insipid canards such as “Bush only cares about enriching his cronies” and “Republicans hate the poor.” I generally try to ignore you, but when you made the ridiculous claim that I think “people commit crimes because they like to commit crime,” I couldn’t let that go without a response.
I’m going back to ignoring you now, and I suggest that my fellow bloggers and commenters do the same.
Jason–you may be correct that legalizing pot would yield a marginal decrease in violent crime. I would guess that the hardest crime is generated by the trade in the hardest drugs, but I haven’t looked into the data on that.
Also I think it’s very likely that a lot of pot dealers would switch to crack or meth, and the demand for those drugs would increase since some of what attracts people to pot is the very fact that it’s illegal so those “thrill-seekers” will look to other drugs when pot becomes as mundane as booze.
Well I don’t seem to agree with Aaron much at all, ever, and the arguments can get tiresome. Moreover, after the first few comments Aaron left I considered him a troll as well. But I’ve come around from that belief, and I appreciate the respect he affords ITA. Therefore it’s inaccurate to say “the authors and polite commenters here consider you a troll” because I don’t think he is one.
I think it’s very likely that a lot of pot dealers would switch to crack or meth, and the demand for those drugs would increase since some of what attracts people to pot is the very fact that it’s illegal so those “thrill-seekers” will look to other drugs when pot becomes as mundane as booze.
There may be a small move in that direction, though data from the Netherlands does not support the contention. Legalized marijuana has caused little if any change either in marijuana usage patterns or in those for harder drugs. The one change observed has been that marijuana doesn’t lead people so much to trying other recreational drugs, since no one ever goes out to their local drug dealer, looking for pot, and finds that he’s all out (but that he has this other stuff for sale). I can’t recall where I read the study offhand, but if you are interested I could keep searching for it… I even found myself surprised by how little difference there was between pot use in Amsterdam vs. pot use in San Francisco.