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... eileen drug distributors and law enforcement. [ 19 ] The most obvious determinant of the amount of such violence is the amount of law enforcement directed against drugs within the U. S. This should include both efforts against the distribution network and efforts against small scale and home production, since either can lead to violent conflict.
In addition, one would expect that the willingness of drug distributors to employ violence against law enforcement would depend on the amount at stake and so increase with both total revenue and profit. Similarly, to the extent that law enforcement efforts are aimed at seizing property, either for civil forfeiture or private theft, one would expect such efforts to increase with the value of the property available to be seized. So policies that raise the cost of bringing drugs into the country ought to increase such violence if demand is inelastic, decrease it if demand is elastic. Here again, one might expect well established firms to successfully protect themselves, either by bribing law enforcement or by developing networks of trust. If so, enforcement efforts that destabilized the industry could be expected to increase the level of violence. As in the previous cases, efforts that reduce demand for illegal drugs ought to reduce both revenue and profit, hence reduce violence.
The one exception is demand reduction via law enforcement efforts targeted at users. Such efforts might result in violent conflict between law enforcement agents and suspects. Conclusion My purpose in this essay has been to try to sketch out the possible mechanisms relating illegal drugs to violent crime, and how various enforcement strategies might effect each. The clearest result is that policies which reduce the demand for illegal drugs can usually be expected to reduce the violence associated with the sale and use of such drugs. Policies that increase total revenues or total profits can generally be expected to increase violence, policies that decrease them to decrease it.
Policies that decrease the stability of the illegal distribution industry are likely to increase violence. Generally speaking, increased enforcement of prohibitions on import can be expected to decrease profits; increased enforcement of prohibitions on home production can be expected to increase it. Two more general points are worth making. The first is that, if one regards reductions in drug use as desirable, [ 20 ] the associated violence is not entirely a bad thing. Much it is among people involved in the illegal distribution of drugs. The resulting risk is a cost for that industry, and so raises the price and decreases the consumption of drugs.
That effect must be balanced against the risk that violence creates for bystanders and the costs of violence committed against outsiders. The final point is to observe that my discussion has been aimed almost entirely at the effect of marginal changes in the enforcement of drug prohibition. If we consider instead the effect of shifting from prohibition to legalization, the results are much more straightforward. With one exception, legalization eliminates all of the sources of violence I have been discussing. That exception is violence by drug users as a side effect of drug use. Legalization can be expected to increase drug use, hence it could well increase such violence.
While it could increase it, it could also decrease info two reasons. The first, as noted earlier, is that different drugs are substitutes for each other. Legalization would improve both information and availability, making it easier for users to select drugs with fewer undesirable side effects including the side effect of causing violent behavior. The second reason is that, in an illegal market, quality is likely to be more variable than on a legal market, making severe unanticipated effects, including violent effects, more likely. [Should I add formal models of both the competitive and the monopolistic competitive industry models to this, perhaps as an appendix? ] Nils Christie, "Conflicts as Property, " British Journal of Criminology 17 (1) [ 1 ] The very beginning of the graph is probably unreliable, since in the first few years only a fraction of the states were providing data. Alcohol prohibition begin in... and ended in... [ 2 ] Jeffrey A.
Miron, "Violence and the U. S. Prohibitions of Drugs and Alcohol, '' American Law and Economics Review, 1, Fall 1999, 78 - 114. [ 3 ] Both of Miron's papers are available from his home page at: web. "Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis, '' the unpublished piece, measures drug enforcement by drug seizures. It finds a strong relation between enforcement and murder rates, but the relation is mostly driven by a single case Columbia, which has a murder rate of... , ...
times higher than the U. S. Since Columbia is a major producer of illegal drugs, the high seizure rate cannot be taken as a good measure of enforcement effort; there are, after all, a lot more illegal drugs there to seize than almost anywhere else. [ 4 ] But see Jeffrey A. Miron, "Do Prohibitions Raise Prices: Evidence from the Market for Cocaine, " (unpublished, on his web page) for some evidence to the contrary. [ 5 ] Of course, the number of users might increase, but given the non-pecuniary costs of drug use it is hard to see how they could increase rapidly enough with a fall in price to keep the demand elastic at low prices. For some evidence on this point, it would be interesting to investigate the fraction of people in places where marijuana is legal who smoke it usage rates for various drugs that were legal early in this century. Is there data? [ 6 ] This fits the description in The Cocaine Kids, ... [ 7 ] The economics of such a situation are similar to those of the competition of nations for territory and the associated tax base described in David Friedman, "An Economic Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations, " JPE...
In that paper, however, my concern was with the equilibrium outcome, not the costs of getting and maintaining it. [ 8 ] Presumably, precautions would take forms such as drinking at home when it was more fun to drink at a bar, or locking up a gun and giving someone else the key before drinking, or merely exercising self control while drunk, at some costs in enjoyment. While none of these precautions has a cost paid in money, each of them is, considered as a cost, equivalent to some amount of money. [ 9 ] This issue is discussed at some length in David Friedman, Law's Order, Chapter 7, pp. 74 - 83. [ 10 ] Presumably, prohibition makes sense only when you want to impose a cost higher than any tax you can collect; putting the argument differently, a tax so high that nobody pays it and all alcohol is smuggled is equivalent to prohibition. [ 11 ] Note that the demand for violence by people who are violent because of drinking cannot be less elastic than their demand for alcohol, because of the argument we have just sketched. But the total demand for violence can be if most of it comes from other people who are harder to deter. [ 12 ] This argument requires, of course, that there are no legal activities which provide similar opportunities to accept risk in exchange for money and provide a more attractive way of earning money than illegal activities. [ 13 ] Grossman, Michael, The Economics of Substance Use and Abuse: The Role of Price, April 2000 provides empirical evidence on demand elasticity for a variety of addictive drugs. He concludes that demand elasticity may well be greater than 1, meaning that total expenditure may fall as price rises. Becker, Gary S. , Michael Grossman and Kevin Murphy, An Empirical Analysis of Cigarette Addiction, American Economic Review, 84 (no. 3): 396 - 418, June 1994 find a long run price elasticity for cigarettes above. 7. [ 14 ] Drug use by musicians may be an exception. [ 15 ] This is a point raised by Jeffrey Miron in a closely related context. [ 16 ] In equilibrium in a perfectly competitive industry, economic profit is zero. The profits I am considering here need not be economic profit in that sense.
They include returns to sunk costs in human and organizational capital (strictly speaking, quasi rents), monopoly profits, returns to specialized human abilities in scarce supply, and the like. [ 17 ] The obvious case is marijuana growing. [ 18 ] The Last Testament of Lucky Luicano claims to be based on first hand information from one of the leading criminal entrepreneurs of the prohibition period. While there seems to be no way of confirming the author's claim, I suspect it is true on internal evidence the picture presented of the illegal market appears economically plausible. One interesting feature of the account is that criminal firms which were otherwise independent appear to have pooled assets for the purpose of purchasing the services of corrupt judges and law enforcement agents, suggesting that that was a, perhaps the, major source of economies of scale in that industry. [ 19 ] Are there any sources for data on this? For 1995, 131 law enforcement agents were killed in the line of duty (stat abstract).
Figures go back to 1980; there is no clear pattern, although the 1980 figure is high. [ 20 ] I should perhaps add that I do not regard reductions in drug use as inherently desirable. Following out the usual assumptions of economics, I assume that drug users, like other people, are rational, and so tend, on the whole, to make the decisions that best serve their interest. Hence their decision to use drugs is evidence that doing so, on net, benefits them. That implies that it is more generally desirable, except to the extent that it imposes costs on others. Since most such costs at present are the result not of drug use but of drug prohibition, I see no reason to regard reductions in drug use as an unambiguously desirable outcome.
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Research essay sample on Study On Drugs Violence And Economics
