>> I thought they dreamed up crack as a way of selling cocaine to downmarket consumers.
There are all kinds of explanations, but the bottom line is that the harder law enforcement gets on a particular drug the greater the purity. But also, alternatives come available -- as in the case of the war on cocaine which William Bennett has touted as a "success", he fails to point out that there has been a huge transition to the worse drug methamphetamine.
As the war on meth ramped up, the Mexican cartels got involved. They buy precursor by the ton from Asia and import huge quantities of ultra-pure meth into the US, which has made the addiction problem even worse. Meanwhile, in many places [here] in the US you cannot even buy Sudafed without an Rx now, in efforts to control meth -- meth addicts just buy the high-end stuff from the cartels.
Donald Rumsfeld, no stranger to the problem (his son is an addict), fully understood the issue:
During his confirmation hearings in 2001:
"If demand persists, it’s going to get what it wants. And if it isn’t from Colombia, it’s going to be from someplace else.”
Later, commenting on opium growing in Afghanistan:
“You push it down in one country, and it goes up in another country” said RUMSFELD. “You push it down in four countries, and the price goes up because there’s a shortage, and the higher the price, the greater the willingness of people to take risk, the greatest — greater the willingness of people to buy the kinds of things they need to hide what they’re doing and to protect them as they transport these materials.”
He fully understood the problem: You can't attack drugs from the supply side and expect to be successful. You must curtail demand, and the only way to do that is to provide treatment.
At the beginning of the war on drugs, an FBI employee was put in charge of organizing some of the inner city efforts. They were, at the time, tracking a fixed number of drug dealers' activities in Phoenix and one other city. In an effort to gather information on techniques for attacking the problem, they conducted raids and were successful in getting every one of the known drug dealers off the streets over the course of a few days. The drug supply dried up totally -- for ONE WEEK, after which supply levels were back to normal. You just can't kill this problem by locking people up. |
