Joint at the Hip.(drugs and crime)

The powerful link between, drugs and crime

My partner, Tony G., tossed another manila crime file towards me in disgust. I picked it up and read the details. Apparently, a business owner had hired a man to do some work and the guy ended up stealing a bunch of equipment. The suspect pawned the property and used the money to buy crack. I pointed to my stack of files. "I've got a couple just like this in my pile." Typically, the wrongdoer doesn't even try to hide the fact he is stealing. When caught, he falls back on the excuse that he's an addict and needs treatment, not punishment. Yet in my experience, the vast majority of addicts either resist any treatment or fail to follow through with it.

As my fellow cops can tell you, drugs and crime go together like gum and sidewalks, and "legalizing" the drugs won't change that sticky connection. Drugs will continue to lead to crime and to drag non-drug-takers into the crime scene.

Take the property crimes that make up much of my workload. Even if drugs were legalized and (as proponents claim) drug prices fell as a result, the typical addict would still end up unable to support his habit because the typical addict can't hold a job, period. Nor can he bring himself to stay in treatment without some outside coercion.

One teenage girl mixed up with some of my worst juvenile thieves, for example, explains that her parents and the parents of her criminal friends are all generous with money, and the gang never lacked cash for the cheap drugs like marijuana. But while their indulgent moms and dads gave them enough handouts to buy all the beer and joints they could consume, there wasn't enough cash for the $100 or so a night needed for powder cocaine--"the champagne of drugs," as she puts it. And so she and her friends began stealing from relatives, neighbors, classmates, strangers. If pot, the drug most of these kids started out with, had been legal, they and many more like them would only have been encouraged to move on, as they did, to harder drugs which require crime to afford.

Nor would legal drugs have kept this girl from the many problems she experienced. Her drug-taking caused her to hang out with thug wannabes; it caused her "A" student grades to tumble; it diminished her resistance to promiscuity and hooliganism. After she joined the drug scene, her self-respect and her respect for other people and their property went out the window. The street cost of her narcotics was only a minor factor in what you could call her de-civilization.

Drug abuse is a threat on many levels. For one thing, the crimes committed by druggies are a considerable drain on both our economy and police time. Recently one of my suspects, who stole equipment from his employer, was arrested for stealing and pawning property from another set of victims. He told the judge he was out of control and needed help. The judge, considering thieving non-violent, released him on a small bond. Back out on the street, the suspect continues to steal to pay for crack--a very cheap drug, by the way--while I struggle to compile the necessary paperwork to make an arrest on his first set of offenses.