| This work addresses topics and issues related to drug prohibition and America's War on Drugs. The first question addressed is, why? Why does the United States have the most draconian drug control regime in the developed world? The answer is found via investigation of history, politics, social organization, and compares American moves with contemporary policies in the Netherlands. The logic of the methodology is two-fold. In the world of drug policy such comparisons are made by both American and Dutch officials alike. Secondly, in appreciating Marxist, Weberian, and Foucauldian ideals about power, politics, social control and organization, legitimate comparisons can be made of similar forms and practices across the two countries.; The second question approaches, the relationship between policing and crime. Specifically, do drug arrests affect property crime rates? The methodology employed to answer this draws on American and Dutch data at the city-level. Inferences about drug policy and crime follow from regression analysis. By examining crime data at the city-level I control for what would otherwise represent problematic cross-national comparisons. By taking data from comparable cross-national units, cities, and controlling for differences like population, household income, unemployment, ethnicity, etc., the regression model calculates the effect, if any, of drug arrests on crime.; The results, findings and conclusions of the work are as follows: bureaucratic and political forces, as affected by political ideologies, when filtered through social distances move government to draft laws that regulate consensual behavior. America's fragmented ethnic and class divisions encourage politicians to punish and marginalize groups without political power. At present, the institutional momentum of the Drug War means that America will advocate draconian measures in the name of “crime control”. For the Dutch, understanding that drug use per se is not deviant or problematic, their leaders decriminalized drug use. Regression analysis shows that, contrary to America's claims, drug arrests do not lower crime rates. Additional conclusions find that if the War on Drugs continues, Americans will suffer police corruption, growing prison costs, and more crime. |
