Peter Moskos, who spent a year policing Baltimore's streets and recently wrote a book on the experience, is unimpressed that we've killed a Colombian drug lord:These kind of headlines, this one from the BBC, always crack me up... and make me sad. Why? Do you feel safer? This guy's death won't mean shit. Some other drug lord will take his place. I nominate his second-in-command.I mean, really... Does anybody think that killing some bad guy is going to win the global war on drugs?We got rid of Noriega. Think of all those "cartels" we broke up in Columbia. We get drug lords all the time. We got millions in prison. We invaded Afghanistan! Keep up the fight! Another victory! But it doesn't matter. This is so 1984. Why won't we win? Because--as Chris Rock so eloquently puts it--people wanna get high.Drug users don't support terrorism. The War on Drugs supports terrorists. Shame on us.Among the many problems with the drug war is our tendency to recast a market demand we dislike as a problem of villains. Drug dealers get all the glory, but they're basically interchangeable manifestations of the desire to use drugs. It's very exciting when you nab a dealer, but another just arises in his place. And so we have this massive drug war full of casualties and economic costs and jail time and all the rest and the main impact of it is to shuffle who's on top of the drug trade at any given moment. We're not stopping the flow of drugs, we're just churning the market of providers. If we insist on having a War on Drugs, we'd probably be smarter just picking a cartel we think is relatively humane and easy to police and orienting our strategy towards destroying their scrappy and more innovative competitors. Keep the devil you know, and can effectively contain, at the top. Otherwise, whoever fights their way into the vacuum created by the last dealer's destruction will probably be even more ruthless and savvy and efficient than their predecessor. Those of us who watched the Wire know we'd prefer to have the Barksdale gang than the Stanfield crew running Baltimore.(Image used under a Creative Commons license from kr4gin.)
