Winnipeg’s gang problem is a drug-prohibition problem

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/07/2011 (5208 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So Winnipeg has a gang problem? I’m guessing it has something to do with the illicit drug market, which is usually controlled by gangs of various kinds. If so, this is entirely predictable.

As the authors of last year’s Effect of Drug Law Enforcement on Drug-Related Violence wrote, “… From an evidence-based public policy perspective, gun violence and the enrichment of organized crime networks appear to be natural consequences of drug prohibition.”

In other words, drug prohibition produces crime — just as alcohol prohibition did. Our collective inability — or is it unwillingness? — to grasp this lesson is on full display in Winnipeg today.

What’s more interesting than the finding that drug prohibition causes gang-related violence is our collective inability 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 the Winnipeg police.

What’s equally interesting is the persistence of the belief in harsher sentences and tougher enforcement as the one-size-fits-all remedy. If this were true, the United States, with the harshest drug-sentencing laws in the democratic world, would have achieved that happy drug-free utopia dreamed of by Nancy Reagan. And Russia, which today has an epidemic of heroin addiction and severe sentencing practices, would be a very different place.

The persistent failure of harsh sentences to reduce drug demand and drug use, wherever you look in the democratic world, seems unable to impress the defenders of the get-tough orthodoxy. Police lament that the same names recur on charge sheets and complain that judges are too soft and the criminal justice system is inadequate to the task.

But what gets lost, in the unwillingness to grasp the lessons of history, is one very obvious and simple social fact: Illicit drugs are a commodity in a market ruled by laws that are every bit as reliable as those that rule the universe.

Yet somehow these market laws of supply and demand are held in suspension — as if they don’t or should not apply — when the problem is illicit drugs.

It should be clear that as long as there is a demand for drugs, someone will supply them, because demand creates supply, and as long as the drugs themselves are prohibited, the suppliers will be criminals. Hence only those willing to bear the risk premium will profit from the supply for illicit drugs.

That makes them 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.

Maybe it should not be this way, but that’s how it works in black markets, and how it has always worked. Why should Winnipeg be any different?

So Winnipeg’s gang war will persist until one or another faction establishes dominance over the others and the market for illicit drugs stabilizes again.

Most likely this will happen with the unintentional assistance of the police, who will successfully — however temporarily — incarcerate enough members of one faction to give rival factions the advantage.

This is how gang wars end, unless and until policy makers face up to the laws of supply and demand. And there is no indication of that happening very soon.

 

Craig Jones, who holds a PhD in political economy from Queen’s University, is a former executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada.