It’s also predictable because the whole thrust of police action around gangs and drugs – as required by the logic of prohibition – focuses on the supply side, and, as such, is doomed to fail, and to encourage violence as groups try to gain control over market share. Demand cannot exist without supply, and no amount of police action – at least not that which is tolerable to a democratic society – can alter these fundamental laws.
What’s more interesting than the finding that drug prohibition causes gang-on-gang violence is our inability – or is it unwillingness? – to learn from repeated demonstrations of this connection. For some reason, we seem to think that what’s happening in northern Mexico – where drug-trafficking gangs are at war with each other and with the Mexican army – is somehow different from what’s happening in Winnipeg, where drug-trafficking gangs are at war with each other and with the Winnipeg Police Service. There is a difference in scale, to be sure, but not in kind. Drug prohibition enriches organized crime, and police crackdowns on drug suppliers provoke gang-on-gang violence over market share.
Equally interesting is the persistence of the belief that harsher sentences and tougher enforcement are the remedy. History and evidence have repeatedly refuted the notion that the iron laws of supply and demand can be trumped by tougher punishment. If harsher sentences and tougher enforcement worked, then the United States – the country with the harshest drug-sentencing laws in the democratic world – would have achieved that happy drug-free utopia that Nancy Reagan dreamed of.
Nevertheless, harsh sentences’ persistent failure to reduce drug use – wherever you look in the democratic world – seems unable to dissuade the defenders of “get tough” orthodoxy. Police lament the fact that the same names appear on charge sheets over and over again, and complain that judges are soft and that the criminal justice system is inadequate to the task. But what gets lost is the obvious and simple fact that illicit drugs are a commodity in a market ruled by laws that prevent it from being any other way.
Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz repeats another discredited orthodox bit of “get tough” logic: that the key to cracking down on gangs is to be “in their face night and day.” Actually, that kind of pressure could produce the unintended consequence of unifying rival gangs around a common enemy, thus leading to even greater violence, to say nothing of its effects on police-community relations. As long as drugs are prohibited, the suppliers will be criminals. And since they can’t arbitrate their market conflicts in courts of law, they gun it out with each other, and with the police. That’s how it works in black markets, and how it has always worked. You can’t have drug prohibition without bursts of gang-on-gang violence – just as you can’t have demand without supply.
So, Winnipeg’s gang war will persist until one or another faction establishes dominance and the market for illicit drugs stabilizes again. This will most likely happen with the unintentional assistance of the police, who will successfully – albeit temporarily – incarcerate enough members of one faction to give rival factions a temporary advantage. This is how gang wars end, and how they will continue to end until policy-makers face up to the laws of supply and demand.
Origin
Source: the Mark
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