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Example research essay topic: War On Drugs Violent Crime - 1,673 words

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Introduction One point on which almost everyone interested in drug prohibition agrees is the existence of a connection between drugs and violent crime. The disagreement is on the form of the connection and the sign of the correlation. Supporters of drug prohibition typically argue that drug use leads to violent crime and should be illegal in part for that reason. Critics of the war on drugs argue that the attempt to prohibit drug use leads to violent crime and that that is one of the reasons drugs should be legal. A glance at the figures for U.

S. murder rates over the course of this century provides some support for the critics' position (Figure 1). [ 1 ] Murder rates were high during the period of alcohol prohibition, fell after repeal, rose again with increased efforts to prohibit illegal drugs, and remain high. The impression given by the graph is confirmed by more sophisticated analysis. Jeffrey A. Miron has analyzed the relation between violent crime in the U. S. , as measured by the murder rate, and the enforcement of drug prohibition (including alcohol prohibition) as measured by expenditures by the federal agencies in charge of enforcing prohibition (Figure 2), over the entire period for which murder rates are available on a national basis.

His statistical results "suggest the homicide rate is currently 25 %- 75 % higher than it would be in the absence of drug prohibition. "[ 2 ] The case of the U. S. is particularly interesting for at least two reasons. One is that the U.

S. murder rate is anomalously high relative to other countries that are otherwise similar about 8 to 10 murders per 100, 000 population over the past two decades, compared to 1 to 2 for countries such as Canada, Australia, the U. K. and countries in western Europe. The other is that the U. S.

provides data on both the murder rate and enforcement of drug prohibition over a fairly long period of time. The high U. S. murder rate is frequently attributed to the high rate of gun ownership in the U. S. , relative to most comparable nations. One problem with that explanation is that, while it is true that there is a significant correlation in international comparisons between gun ownership and murder rates, that correlation is driven by a single observation the U.

S. Regressions with the U. S. omitted show much weaker results, despite the existence of other countries with relatively high gun ownership rates and without anomalously high murder rates.

A second problem is that the behavior of murder rates over time, both in the U. S. and elsewhere, does not seem to be closely linked to gun ownership or legal restrictions thereof. That suggests the possibility that U. S. murder rates are due to something other than gun ownership, with the gun ownership rate either unrelated to, or consequence rather than cause of, the murder rate.

Since U. S. drug prohibition, while similar on paper to the laws in most of the countries it is compared to, is much more strongly enforced, it provides a possible explanation. Professor Miron has attempted to investigate the relation between violent crime and drug law enforcement across countries, in work that is not yet published but is available on the web. [ 3 ] While the results are consistent with the U. S. results, the evidence is very much weaker, in part perhaps because of the lack of good data to measure drug law enforcement across countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate not the statistical evidence but the economic theory. I consider the various causal mechanisms by which drug use and drug prohibition might be linked to violent crime, and try to determine, in each case, how various enforcement mechanisms might be expected to influence violent crime through that mechanism. One reason to do so is to provide the theoretical framework for further statistical work suggest ways in which analysis of the relevant data might tell us more about exactly how drug prohibition and violent crime are related. A second reason is to provide a framework for considering what the effects of different enforcement strategies might be expected to be, and why.

The paper consists of this introduction, three main sections, and a conclusion. The first section sketches the possible causal relations between drugs and violent crime. The second briefly sketches possible enforcement strategies for preventing drug use. The third combines the previous two, and attempts to analyze the effect that alternative strategies might have on violent crime via each of the causal relations.

Part I: How Drugs Might Influence Violent Crime Broadly speaking, the link between drugs and violent crime could occur in three ways: violent crime by consumers of drugs, violent crime associated with the production and distribution of drugs, or violent crime directly associated with the attempt to enforce drug prohibition. For the case of crime by drug consumers, two mechanisms are commonly asserted, with opposite implications. One is drugs as in input to violent crime people committing crimes under the influence of drugs that they otherwise would not commit. This claim is made both for drugs for which it is pharmacologic ally implausible, such as heroin and marijuana, and for ones for which it is plausible, such as alcohol. If it is correct, the obvious implication is that drug prohibition, by reducing consumption of drugs, can be expected to reduce violent crime.

The other claim is that drug users commit crimes in order to get the money to pay for drugs. If that is correct, the effect of marginal changes in enforcement is theoretically ambiguous. Making drugs more expensive increases the expenditure of drug users per unit of drug consumed, but decreases consumption, so the net effect on the expenditure of drug users depends on the elasticity of demand. If, however, as is widely believed, [ 4 ] the price of currently illegal drugs would be very low if they were legal, then the effect of legalization via this mechanism is unambiguous, since consumption has an upper bound set by non-pecuniary constraints. A heroin user who maintains his level of expenditure on heroin when its price falls by a factor of a hundred will no longer be able to commit crimes to pay for his habit, because he will be dead. [ 5 ] Violent crime by people involved in the distribution network for drugs might also come about by a variety of mechanisms.

One possibility, is that violence occurs because people in that industry have wealth in highly portable forms drugs and cash which make them obvious targets for theft or robbery, and since calling the police is not a practical option they must use private violence instead to protect themselves. [ 6 ]. A second, suggested by Jeffrey Miron, is that violence occurs as a form of dispute resolution among people who cannot use legal channels because their disputes are occurring in an illegal industry A third, and rather different, possibility is that violent crime represents rent seeking in the competition among suppliers. Suppose, as much anecdotal evidence suggests, that drug distribution often occurs through local monopoly providers. Their profits depend in part on the area they control. So we would expect competition between adjacent firms for territory. One form such competition might take would be violence by agents of one firm against agents, or possibly customers, of another. [ 7 ] The final source of violence is the enforcement of drug prohibition.

Part of enforcement is arresting people, seizing drugs, and similar activities all of which carry with them the risk of a violent confrontation between law enforcement agents and people who they suspect of violating the drug laws. Part II: Possible Strategies for Reducing Drug Use There are a variety of ways in which a government might try to reduce the use of illegal drugs. Roughly speaking, they can be categorized as ways of reducing the demand for illegal drugs, ways of reducing the import of illegal drugs, and ways of reducing the (domestic) production and distribution of illegal drugs. One way of reducing demand is by making substitutes, such as methadone for heroin addicts, more readily available.

A more extreme version of that approach would be to legalize some drugs in order to reduce the demand for others. A different approach is to subsidize drug treatment centers; whether that works depends on whether drug users are actually helpless addicts who would quit if they only had a little help, or rational consumers choosing to use drugs because they like the effects they produce. Another way of reducing demand is by enforcing drug laws against users spending law enforcement resources on identifying consumers of illegal drugs, prosecuting them, and punishing them. A weaker version of this approach is to make drug use more costly by encouraging drug testing by employers. What about discouraging the import of illegal drugs? This strategy might take a variety of forms, ranging from more careful customs inspection to waging war against producing national of which involve activities either outside the U.

S. or on the border. From the standpoint of effects inside the U. S. , any such policy has roughly the same effects increases the cost of drugs to the distributors. The final alternative is one that appears to consume a large fraction of the domestic law enforcement resources devoted to the war on drugs in the U. S.

actions against domestic production and distribution. Here it is useful to distinguish between actions against small scale domestic producers, including those producing for their own use, and attempts to identify, arrest and prosecute people in the business of mass producing and / or distributing illegal drugs. Part III: Economics of Drug Prohibition In this section, I will try to look at each of the mechanisms discussed in part I of this essay, and see what we can say about the likely effect on violence of the various enforcement approaches, assuming that only that mechanism is involved...


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Research essay sample on War On Drugs Violent Crime

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