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Via Brad, this sounds like something out of The Wire:
The trick, he said, wasn't to focus on eliminating drugs but rather to shut down the most "overt" drug markets, the ones operating so openly that they attracted prostitution and violent crime. "Instead of looking at it as a drug problem, we decided to think of it as a drug-market problem," Sumner says. "What the public really couldn't stand was the violence associated with public drug markets." Dealers operating in the open are targets for stickup men and other would-be robbers, and the public swagger and turf consciousness of street slingers can cradle violent, simmering beefs.....In 2007, in the program's fourth year, [the number of drug-related murders] has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. "The use of drugs isn't something we could affect," says Kennedy. "But the violence was."Whereas the strongest element of the third season of The Wire was the description of just how difficult it was to change an aspect of Drug War policy on the local level, the Wallace-Wells article notes that numerous police departments across the country have adopted a model similar to that described above, and that Congress and the Feds have treated the innovations with neglect rather than hostility. That seems to hold out some hope for, over time, a broad transformation in how the War on Drugs is conducted at the local level. There's a bit of an interesting parallel with the counter-insurgency doctrine of David Petraeus; although it's a war that shouldn't be fought, it makes sense to try to fight it in the least destructive way. --Robert Farley
