Drugs and violence
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Do drugs lead people to violence, or do anti-drug laws create criminal classes that use violence as a tool? I think the latter.
While spelunking criminological data, I plotted the U.S. homicide rate from the early 20th century on … and noticed a very odd curve (click the pic to enlarge). Murders dropped during the Great Depression and well before World War II. Homicides stayed low (well, low for us Yanks) through the late 1960′s, then spiked sharply upwards. Slayings in the 1980-1990 often spike to double the rate they were in the Ike era.
I decided to plot the enactment (and one repeal) of anti-drug laws and found a troubling correlation. Now, we all know that causal analysis is invalid, and my little examination is not statistically provable, but it does give cause for pause. If we stipulate than making popular products illegal creates a thriving black market for them, and that criminals running these markets are willing to use violence to protect profits (as they did in Prohibition), then a lead-lag between restriction and violence would be predictable.
The one best thing we could do in the United States to reduce violent crime would be to legalize drugs. Given that were are over 1.3 million violent crimes in 2004, over 16,000 murders, we could save a lot of blood just by letting dopers pollute their blood.
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