Drug War Strategy: Reagan's War on Drugs Reduced Crime in an Unexpected Way

A most fascinating thesis.

The Atlantic Wire: "... a group of anthropologists at City University of New York floated a theory for the ongoing crime reduction in New York that they extrapolated nationally: Crime is falling because drugs are getting cheaper. In short, the thinking goes that most crime is drug-related in general, usually committed by users to pay for their fix. So if drugs are cheaper, users will commit fewer crimes to buy them. But there's an odd theme running through this: The paper hangs the decrease in drug prices largely on Ronald Reagan's strict drug policies, which eventually led to less violence, but not at all in the way the Ronald Reagan administration would have expected when it declared war on drugs.

Reagan (tackeled) the supply, the transportation, and the distribution of drugs. But the paper by anthropologists at John Jay college in New York argues that those policies didn't stem the flow of drugs. Rather, they helped make drugs cheaper, which eventually reduced the need for users to commit so many crimes." read more