Professor Polsby says to simply eliminate the criminal sanction and begin the analysis. This position omits the effects of the large body of social conditioning that affects behavior, such as taxation, licensing, and other regulations, as well as the role of education and custom. To discuss alternatives to the current prohibition regime in any depth, one must consider at least some of the variety of controls that have been proposed to be substituted for the current non sequitur called the "Controlled Substances Act." (Overall, the least controlled substances in the American economy today are the "controlled substances.") The conceptual flaw of this analysis is that it poses drug policy as the choice between two stark opposites, prohibition and legalization -- simple and unmediated. The latter approach, advocated by Dr. Thomas Szasz would eliminate all types of regulation of drugs.[8] Yet, almost every aspect of commerce in America is regulated and that regulation is at various points on the spectrum between prohibition and free-market legalization. Almost everything is regulated in some fashion. The American system has demonstrated a genius for regulation. My arguments that drugs must be carefully regulated, neither prohibited nor sold in a free market has led Dr. Szasz to characterize me as a "chemical communist," and to criticize Dr. Ethan Nadelmann's "use of the term [drug legalization] to describe a program of more, not less, government control over drugs."[9] However, to set aside the likelihood of post-prohibition regulation is a large leap to make in order to insist upon an assumption that juvenile drug use will increase.

Alcohol distribution is an obvious example of a regulatory scheme between the poles of prohibition and non-regulation. Today, alcohol regulation comes with a high price of relatively easy evasion, which in part is due to a lack of public attention to its enforcement, and extensive promotion to minors.[10] Alcohol use by minors who are not permitted to acquire or consume alcohol legally remains at very high levels, on a national basis,[11] but with fluctuations by community, and other social markers. The typical regulations require identification of buyers for proof of age. Many of the younger-appearing purchasers are typically asked to produce proof of age as a condition to purchase. The consequences to adults for furnishing alcohol to minors who are not their children are usually minor. The offenses are rarely investigated or enforced. In the eyes of the police in many parts of the country, alcohol consumption by minors is a minor matter.[12] Public education against juvenile alcohol use is frequently flat and boring compared to the advertising on television promoting the use of beer and wine, much of which is targeted at young consumers, namely the Budweiser frogs, the Stroh's dog, Bud Light's Spuds McKenzie, et cetera.[13]

Almost every jurisdiction regulates sale by limiting the time of day of permissible sales, often by day of week, limiting Sunday sales. In some jurisdictions there are quantity purchase limitations. In Pennsylvania, for example, the retail purchase of beer at taverns is limited to two six-packs at one time -- a form of rationing. The manner and place of advertising is limited. Zoning regulations limit the proximity of alcohol retail outlets to schools, churches, and other facilities.

Professor Polsby, by proposing for analysis a hypothetical of a totally unregulated distribution approach, and an approach that disregards alternative social sanctions, assumes that use will therefore increase. However, eliminating the opportunity for regulation eliminates the opportunity to impose mechanisms which, for alcohol and tobacco, have resulted in reductions in consumption over recent decades. Tobacco and alcohol consumption have varied in the past two decades in part because of modifications of regulations which include taxation and limitations upon the time, place and manner of consumption. Taxation policies have been found to reduce the consumption of alcohol and tobacco.[14] So it is a mistake to suggest that the options in drug distribution controls are simply between two remote poles, and to make one's argument about assumptions about one of those poles.

Having dismissed the varieties of controls that have been proposed by "legalizers," Professor Polsby characterizes all of them. They are all governed exclusively by "price theory," namely drugs in a legalized regime will be cheaper, and hence more accessible -- to adults and to children. But as Mark Moore has pointed out, the difficulty in acquiring drugs is an important factor in considering the true "cost" of drugs as is the actual dollar price.[15] "Drug availability" is a more important variable and much broader than simply price.[16]

In a regulated market availability can be regulated by mechanisms in addition to dollar cost. For example, while the dollar price of drugs sold to a licensed drug buyer could be substantially less than the current (and then) black market price, satisfying the qualifications for obtaining a license to buy drugs could involve overcoming substantial obstacles. License qualifications could include age restrictions, knowledge requirements, training in use under supervised conditions, a probationary period before a full license is extended, insurance requirements, agreeing to close oversight by a reviewing authority, and maintenance of job and family responsibilities. The price could be quite low, but availability might be quite limited.

The abuse of drugs is a threat to public safety. Another instance of great public concern about public safety is in air travel. The public is very worried about the safety of commercial airplanes, and the people who fly them. Yet the general public pays relatively little attention to how private pilots are licensed -- even though the errors of such pilots endanger other aircraft and people on the ground. Despite rigorous licensing, there were 730 deaths of general aviation pilots, passengers and persons on the ground in 1994, the lowest number of general aviation fatalities in the past dozen years.[17] Nevertheless, there is no loud public call for banning general aviation or modifying the way in which private pilots are trained or licensed.

But as is obvious to all but scholars, purchasing decisions involve many considerations other than price. Attitudes about commodities or experience can greatly affect behavior. For some persons, fears about air travel are greater impediments than price. One can fly to many destinations within 300-400 miles in a general aviation plane much less expensively than in a commercial aircraft. Yet, most people, if offered the choice of "hitch-hiking" by private plane from their hometown to where they want to go, at bargain rates, would not do so. Sky-diving is probably affordable to most of the middle-class, but it remains a sport with very limited participation.

Communication to children about the risks of drug use (or drug dealing as Professor Kleiman reminds us) affects decision making. The leading researchers into juvenile drug use -- the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan -- believe that the primary factor affecting juvenile drug use is the perception of the danger of the drug use.[18] Communication about risk is affected by legal status, but the persons at greatest risk for making the high-risk decision may be least influenced by legal status.

2. Drug Use by Children -- the Potential Benefits

Professor Polsby categorically claims that "children must not use recreational drugs at all."[19] At the superficial level, this is as non-controversial as asserting that children should not play with lice infected with typhus. But when the statement is made by one who is arguing for decriminalizing drugs, the statement might be seen as a reflexive defense. Since Professor Polsby is asserting that children are likely to have increased access to drugs, he must insist that this is bad. Those who object to "decriminalization" or "legalization" often assert that those who propose such approaches are indifferent to the "inevitability" of second graders injecting heroin, and fifth-graders smoking crack.

Of course, Professor Polsby's otherwise non-objectionable assertion is presented with a clever twist: identify a potential benefit and discount it. Professor Polsby insists that the enjoyment children might have from drug use cannot be counted as a benefit in the same economic sense that the enjoyment that a bank robber takes in the act of robbery cannot be counted as a benefit. However, the economist does count the money obtained by the robber as a benefit.

As "cover" for taking his contrarian position, Professor Polsby probably offers this injunction with a different intention than those who state a rule such as "children shouldn't play with matches," or "children shouldn't play with guns." Those rules, of course, are about the risks to the very young and to the unsupervised children. But, in fact, many parents teach their children how to use matches and how to use firearms. Many parents would consider themselves negligent for failing to do so. There are many parents, for example, who make alcohol or tobacco available to their teenage children, in circumstances under their control because they believe that the children will better learn responsible patterns of use under their tutelage than in the context of the forbidden and unknown. In many Jewish families, the ritual use of wine by children is believed to be a cultural inoculation against alcohol abuse. Even a parent who never uses tobacco might reasonably believe that permitting a child to experiment with cigarettes separates smoking from association with being independent from the parents or with rebellion against parental rules, and thus perhaps stripping cigarette smoking as a practice from any benefit whatsoever. Very simply, Professor Polsby's assertion fails to consider the potential educational value of the experience.

A similarity might also be drawn to the parents who provides sex education to their teenagers to demystify sex with the objective that the child not engage in sex ignorantly, recklessly or dangerously. Some parents might provide their children with birth control technology or condoms to minimize the risks of sexual experimentation. This is a form of "harm reduction," a term often used in contemporary discussions of drug policy. A classic example is to provide injecting drug users with sterile injection equipment to prevent the transmission of HIV, hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases.

Probably most parents would readily agree that they do not want their children to engage in sex, to drink alcohol, to smoke cigarettes or to use drugs. But it would be a much smaller fraction that would insist that their children must not engage in sex at all -- ever, or that their children must never drink alcohol ever, or that their children must never, ever try a cigarette; and that in the face of that absolute, all parents must be barred from taking any approach that permits supervised experimentation. There is no a priori reason to believe that parents who permit their children the opportunity to smoke marijuana at age sixteen in order to eliminate the rebellion incentive to use it are logically incorrect.

There is data associating teenage marijuana use to high-risk behaviors or pathology. But this data, to my knowledge, does not distinguish the circumstances of the initiation to teenage marijuana use. It may be that those teenagers who experience less serious consequences in their marijuana use first used marijuana in less dangerous or less emotionally loaded circumstances, such as under parental supervision.

In the Native American Church of North America, teenagers use the peyote sacrament in worship. Peyote contains mescaline, a Schedule I controlled substance, often described as being similar to LSD. The Federal regulations that permit peyote use in the Native American Church[20] do not bar children from use of the sacrament. I am not aware of any literature that condemns this experience. But when given the label "drug," the dominant culture categorically enjoins the experience and asserts that, a priori, it is bad.

Not only is the absolute injunction against teenage drug experimentation a flawed principle when compared to teaching young people about the other risky activities in the universe, but the recent evaluation data regarding abstinence-based anti-drug programs reveals them to be counter-productive.[21] Children do not believe abstinence-based educational messages. When they try marijuana, for example, and find that it does not have the consequences that they have been taught, they tend to disregard the more justified warnings regarding cocaine or opiates. Indeed, when they are taught that alcohol is a drug, in a manner that is alien from the realities of American life, and witness adult alcohol consumption, they are left believing that in a matter of vital importance to them -- the question of drug use -- they are being lied to. Brown and his colleagues have found students becoming alienated from other educational programs as a consequence.[22]

Is there, perhaps, some valuable experience in "being bad," in breaking the rules? Is there not frequently learning associated with driving a car too fast? Many teenagers at some time in their early driving career drive very fast (90 or 100 m.p.h.), notwithstanding the law and their teaching, to know what it and their car feel like, or simply to have done it. Most teenagers who do so survive and then typically drive at speeds generally accepted as "safe" (60 to 70 m.p.h.), even if they are commonly in excess of the posted speed limits. As novelist Mark Helprin has written about transgressions:

Were the world perfect it would always be wrong to trespass, but as the world is not perfect, sometimes one must. And when you do, you live, you break free, you fly. But you must do it responsibly, you must not injure the innocent. Then, at least before they catch you, it works.

I know that this is true, and the reason it is true, I believe, is that the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God.[23]

It is not, as Professor Polsby insists, "simple."

3. Drug use and The First Amendment -- A Right?

Professor Polsby draws an interesting parallel between pornography and drug use. His argument is designed to make the point that even when a thing might be appropriate for adults but is an evil for children (books or motion pictures with adult content), we do not ban adults from using the material. We should not child-proof the world, he notes approvingly. He anticipates the rebuttal that this is "a First Amendment case to be sure,"[24] which suggests a wholly different point regarding the First Amendment.

In an important respect, drugs are like speech or they are like books -- and their use should be protected by the First Amendment. The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect our ability to make up our mind. The purpose was not simply to protect the printing business -- it was to protect our ability to obtain information and ideas. We have extended the protection of the Freedom of Speech and of the Press beyond the reach of the words in the amendment to include poetry, song, motion pictures, paintings, photographs, the internet, expression of all kinds, even when the expression is obtuse, obscure, or offensive. The purpose of the amendment is ultimately to protect the ability of the viewer, the listener, the experiencer, to have the ideas, thoughts, experiences, or emotions the expression might generate. The purpose is not simply to protect the maker of the sounds or images. We protect the ability of the audience members, the readers, the listeners, and the experiencers, to be uplifted by music, to be enthralled by opera, to be made joyful, to be saddened, to be enraged, to empathize as a consequence of the external stimulation we characterize now as "expression." The purpose is to provide for whatever emotional or intellectual experience humans are capable of that can contribute to making up one's mind. The taking of various drugs triggers the same kinds of experiences.[25]

In a more concrete sense, when a person reads, watches or listens, the sensory signals to the eyes or ears are converted into chemical signals that are transmitted through the central nervous system to various parts of the brain and provide stimulation of thoughts, memory and meaning. Drugs do the same thing. Drugs affect the chemical signals that are transmitted through the central nervous system. They are another form of stimulation of the mind. If constitutionally protected speech makes a person laugh, should not the person have a protected right to choose the direct chemical stimuli that they believe will make them laugh, using marijuana or nitrous oxide, for example? If a person can choose a work of philosophy to try to understand meaning and existence, isn't the choice of ingesting a chemical that may have the same effect protected? If constitutionally protected advertising can stimulate appetite, should not the person who is the target of the advertising -- often unwilling or unwitting -- have the right to choose a chemical means to directly stimulate appetite?

Our law, our courts, and our society condemn censorship when forms of expression are banned, recognizing that such measures violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. We fully appreciate the outrage of the audience deprived by censorship of their right to receive information, as well as the outrage of the author at the suppression of his or her work. Rarely is the audience prosecuted. For example, those who went to hear Lenny Bruce or 2 Live Crew did not risk being arrested. However, in punishing drug users for the simple possession of drugs, we not only deprive an audience which chooses the stimulation, we persecute it.

But the analogy to censorship is much too limited. As noted above, peyote is a schedule I controlled substance which is the sacrament used in the worship of the Native American Church of North America. When people are denied the right to use these kinds of compounds under the drug laws for these kinds of purposes, these laws become indistinguishable from religious persecution.[26]

Those who insist that they have the right and the power to deny other citizens the right to experiences in and of their minds -- in order to protect them from "drug abuse" -- are usually proud that they have never used drugs. It is as though we entrusted prosecution, judgment and sentencing in obscenity cases to those who never actually looked at the material in question.

Neuro scientists have located throughout the brain anatomical structures, called receptors, which react uniquely to various drugs, including tetrahydrocannabinol, the principal active ingredient in marijuana. Researchers have found the chemical that is endogenously produced which uniquely activates that receptor, which the discoverers have named anandamide. The brain is filled with receptors that are activated uniquely by THC and its endogenously produced twin. When these receptors are activated, and they can be activated only by these chemicals, then a person has the experience of being intoxicated by marijuana. If one believes that humans have been created by God, including all of the intricate structures in our body such as the eye and the brain, then one might say, "we have been hard-wired by God to get stoned." In essence, those who claim the power to prohibit the use of drugs such as marijuana claim the power to declare portions of the brain of other citizens to be "off limits" to them.

Of course, this asserted First Amendment right to use drugs is unrecognized. It is unrecognized in the same manner that the right of women to vote was not recognized or protected until the Nineteenth Amendment took effect in 1920. What is the scope of this right? I suggest that the right to use drugs is subject to regulation in some respects to protect the public just as the First Amendment is limited by libel law, or newspapers are regulated by antitrust law.

If we find that there seems to be much in the drug experience that is cheap or base, it is perhaps because that the cheap and base is the greater share of human experience. If we examine the totality of the popular literature, popular music, or other arts, we would find that the mediocre outnumbers the outstanding. For most forms of expression quality is extolled and promoted. If a musical composition or performance is especially pleasing, we are delighted and we recommend it. Similarly, if a poem, a prayer, a play, or a novel is well-done or inspirational, we recommend it and encourage its reproduction. A bad work of art disappears as lacking popular appeal.

However, the situation involving good and bad drug experiences is largely reversed. Bad drug experiences are well-recorded and frequently well-reported. The newspapers are quick to report drug overdoses and poisonings. The exaggeration of these experiences is deliberate. U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, commenting at hearings on LSD in the 1960s said, "Only when you sensationalize a subject matter do you get reform. Without sensationalizing, you don't."[27] At their most catastrophic, unsuccessful drug experiences are referred to the emergency rooms of hospitals, or to morgues and medical examiners. While unsuccessful First Amendment experiences are rarely so severe, clinicians report that persons are disturbed by motion pictures they witness and from other protected speech. At another level, those writings that led to the holocaust and World War II, such as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, are found in libraries throughout the United States.

Because a good drug experience is illegal, the role of drug use in the experience is often hidden, disregarded or discounted. How often does the discoverer, the scientist, the inventor announce that his or her insight was aided by using LSD or marijuana? To do so would risk having the result discounted, no matter what its objective merit. Therefore the drug experience is usually hidden. To argue that the use of a drug had a positive effect is sure to elicit the inevitable rejoinder, "what about the addicts, the crimes, the lives wasted?"

Yet in 1995, Dr. Kary Mullis, the 1993 Nobel prize laureate in chemistry said, "I think I might have been stupid in some respects, if it weren't for my psychedelic experiences."[28] When an idea is expressed as the fruit of a drug experience, the idea is attacked a priori as inferior or ridiculous, and the speaker is attacked as "pro-drug."

Inevitably, all non-prohibition drug policy ideas are now challenged with, "what about crack cocaine?" Indisputably, crack cocaine is viewed as the great demonic drug of our time. The image of the most degraded drug addict is no longer associated with heroin, but with crack. It is the image of the "skeezer," a coke whore who will routinely and repeatedly perform fellatio for $10 to buy a rock of crack.[29] Of course, in the public mind, the crack addict is not a person deserving pity or empathy (or the opportunity for treatment), but an object for revulsion, disgust, contempt and malevolence. Society is quite comfortable kicking a man when he is down, if he is a crack addict. The public image of crack is hard-core cocaine addiction,[30] and all the worst social disorder associated with addiction to prohibited drugs. There is a great deal of violence in the crack markets.[31] But much of crack's status is the result of media exaggeration.

Given crack's bad reputation, is there a First Amendment right to use crack, per se? The Supreme Court has upheld prohibition of obscene speech on the ground that obscenity does not convey any ideas.[32] One might ask, what "ideas" does someone get from using crack? A First Amendment absolutist might say, "The use of crack is part of a right to choose the stimulation of one's central nervous system and the impressions one feels irrespective of the drug chosen or the feeling generated." One inclined to avoid being quoted making a socially outrageous claim might say, "While the right to seek and achieve such stimulation may apply to the use of entheogens or psychedelic drugs, crack use as it is actually experienced is such a different kind of drug use, it is not so protected."

4. Crack Markets and Violence

In analyzing the crack cocaine retail market, it is important to note that not only is crack sold in very small batches -- a few inhalations per vial -- but also that the active addict buys the drug many times during the day. While a marijuana smoker might buy pot weekly or several times monthly, or a heroin user might buy heroin once or twice a day, a crack user might buy crack five times in a day. The addict is frequently running out to get more crack while on a "mission."[33] It is the enormous frequency of purchases that leads to the many retail markets.

Professor Polsby sweepingly states:

[T]he war on drugs cannot plausibly be blamed for the development of the crack cocaine trade, but more or less coincident with the arrival of crack, the budget for the war on drugs began to skyrocket, ultimately sextupling in a matter of only a dozen years. Obviously the war on drugs must have created, even if transiently, a window of economic opportunity for young men willing to put up with the rapidly increasing risks, legal and illegal, of drug dealing.[34]

Several points need to be made about this position. First, to some extent the crack phenomenon was a marketplace response to the opportunities created by the war on drugs anti-marijuana programs of the early 1980s. The Reagan Administration's earliest anti-drug initiatives to blockade the maritime export of marijuana from Colombia were successful in disrupting the supply. Marijuana was bulky and pungent, and thus fishing boats, yachts, merchant freighters, or other vessels concealing marijuana were relatively easy to stop and search. The FY 1982 Department of Defense Authorization Act, which had the effect of modifying the applicability of the Posse Comitatus Act,[35] enabled the U.S. Navy to assist the Coast Guard and the Customs Service in maritime drug interdiction operations. The use of military aircraft to scan maritime traffic in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico was authorized. Vice-President George Bush was appointed to direct a South Florida Task Force to coordinate the use of military and law enforcement interdiction assets. This initiative was a powerful incentive for Colombian drug exporters to shift their exporting from bulky marijuana shipments via a highly vulnerable maritime traffic to compact cocaine powder shipments via rapid, harder to detect aircraft to destinations in Florida or elsewhere in the Southeastern United States. The drug market violence in South Florida in the early 1980s was a conflict for control between the traditional Cuban managers of the cocaine trade and the ambitious Colombian interlopers. The initial war on drugs measures of the Reagan Administration had the consequence of favoring cocaine exports over marijuana exports.

Culturally, the values of the Reagan Administration were much more consistent with cocaine use than with marijuana use. Marijuana use had been associated with the pacifist, laid-back, non-materialistic values of the youth culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. Cocaine was different. An effect of the use of cocaine is a feeling of aggressiveness, feeling sharp, feeling like one is numero uno. The Reagan Administration, inaugurated in 1981 with an armada of limousines, ushered in a reinvigorated cultural value of profit-making, of economic growth, of appreciation of, if not worship of, competition. The pumped-up feeling one gets when using cocaine is harmonious with that self-image. The Reagan years rang out "America is number one," and individuals who wanted to follow suit wanted to feel like they were "number one." The new cultural paradigm of the Reagan years was a renewed encouragement to achieve the status of number one -- the biggest real estate developer, the highest volume broker, the most successful litigator, or the richest doctor. Whether one was a professional athlete or a salesman, cocaine was a shortcut to feeling invincible. And many people believed that if one felt he or she was invincible, such a belief was half of what was necessary to achieve such success. The first half of the 1980s were a time for which cocaine was the perfect drug.

Simultaneously, the program to eradicate marijuana cultivation in California and elsewhere in the U.S. was successful in curbing large-scale marijuana cultivation. The growers' response was to plant fewer plants but to grow them more carefully and and to produce a higher value yield. This resulted in the development of plant breeding, and sinsemilla marijuana, female marijuana plants grown so that they are not fertilized and do not develop seeds. Sinsemilla is more potent than marijuana plants grown in fields where the males are permitted to mature and fertilize the females. Coupled with the scarcity of Colombian marijuana, the high quality domestically grown marijuana could be sold for much higher prices than in the late 1970s. Street markets that once sold marijuana in "nickel" and "dime" bags disappeared. By the mid-1980s, the drug-using ethos in the middle class was beginning to be passe, and anti-drug and drug-free attitudes were ascending. First lady Nancy Reagan had made juvenile and teenage drug use prevention her major public issue. Cocaine consumption by the rich was beginning to diminish. The market need for new outlets was matched by the market opportunities now opened to sell inexpensive units of drugs. Cocaine imports, notwithstanding the control measures, were coming into the country in ever increasing quantities, and cocaine's availability was growing in more and more communities.

For many years, cocaine aficionados knew that cocaine could be "smoked" in the form of freebase. Preparing powder cocaine with baking soda and water and cooking the mixture yielded freebase without the risk of fire or explosion, such as that which seriously burned comedian Richard Pryor. Crack filled a market niche that was in many respects created by the war on drugs.

The war on drugs also created new opportunities for the youth to enter the crack business. The enactment of mandatory minimum sentences in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,[36] triggered by the distribution of at least five grams of crack cocaine[37] or at least fifty grams[38] set the stage to substitute underage workers for adults in the drug market. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 applied the mandatory minimum sentences to attempts to distribute and to all members of conspiracies that distributed at least five grams or fifty grams[39] The potential incarceration costs for adults to take low level jobs in the crack distribution organizations were too high for many to continue, but these costs were not applied to youths not subject to adult-level sentencing, even though there were now special new penalties for employing minors in the trafficking in drugs[40].

Alfred Blumstein saw 1985 as the watershed year for crime and violence among the young because of the onset of crack cocaine. Cocaine powder was usually sold in quantities of multiple doses, whereas crack was much more often purchased one dose at a time. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of transactions, which required many more sellers, which helped lead to the recruitment of kids as sellers. Kids have little sense of risk, or concern about arrest or imprisonment. In the drug market the dealers have to carry guns to protect themselves from being robbed, and so the kids recruited also carried guns.

Kids are highly networked compared to adults. They are extremely concentrated, going to the same schools, belonging to the same kinds of clubs, and hanging out on the same streets (in contrast to adults who are much more mobile and diverse). The practice of carrying guns for protection or for status rapidly diffused among the non-drug selling kids. Guns in the 90s are what sneakers were in the 80s -- accessories for fashion and status. Kids have always fought with each other. But now, as a consequence of the rise of the crack market, guns have replaced fists.[41] Children are now offered drugs, and are now enticed into selling drugs. A reform of drug policies that goes beyond simply changes in statutes may protect more children from more serious drug use or death in drug trade violence.

B. Comments on Reducing the Prevalence of Cocaine and Heroin Dealing Among Adolescents By Mark A.R. Kleiman

Professor Kleiman's paper is a sophisticated analysis that helps break up the paradigms that limit drug policy discussion such as "enforcement equals supply reduction," and "treatment and prevention equal demand reduction." Professor Kleiman draws an important, subtle distinction in police anti-drug activity. Unfocused "street sweeps" that have been notably unsuccessful in Washington, D.C., for example are contrasted with "market disruption" enforcement that has a marketplace objective of minimizing the number of completed drug transactions. Professor Kleiman also draws distinctions between different types of drug buyers and recognizes that society is better rewarded when the ability of highly committed drug users to buy drugs is disrupted.

Professor Kleiman asks intriguingly, "why will drug dealers hire people that McDonald's would not touch, often trusting them with cash or valuable drug inventories?"[42] His answer focuses on the consequence of current laws and enforcement practices, but one should consider the sociological analysis of Philippe Bourgois.[43] Bourgois' in-depth interviews with his neighbors on a block in New York's East Harlem demonstrates that the crack dealers, as boys, were very hard workers. They did errands, carried bags and hustled for legitimate income. But when they sought full-time employment as adults, the employment they could obtain was often in profound cultural conflict with the street culture in which they had shaped their values and identity:

Workers like Caesar and Primo appear inarticulate to their professional supervisors when they try to imitate the language of power in the [white collar] workplace. ... They cannot decipher the hastily scribbled instructions -- rife with mysterious abbreviations -- that are left for them by harried office managers on diminutive Post-its. The "common sense" of white-collar work is foreign to them; they do not, for example, understand the logic in filing triplicate copies of memos or for postdating invoices. When they attempt to improvise or show initiative, they fail miserably and instead appear inefficient -- or even hostile -- for failing to follow "clearly specified" instructions.

Their interpersonal social skills are even more inadequate than their limited professional capacities. They do not know how to look at their fellow service workers -- let alone their supervisors -- without intimidating them. They cannot walk down the hallway to the water fountain without unconsciously swaying their shoulders aggressively as if patrolling their home turf. Gender barriers are an even more culturally charged realm. They are repeatedly reprimanded for offending co-workers with sexually aggressive behavior.

The cultural clash between white "yuppie" power and inner-city "scrambling jive" in the service sector is much more than superficial style. Service workers who are incapable of obeying the rules of interpersonal interaction dictated by professional office culture will never be upwardly mobile. In the high-rise office buildings of midtown Manhattan or Wall Street, newly employed inner-city high school dropouts suddenly realize they look like idiotic buffoons to the men and women for whom they work. This book's argument -- as conveyed in its title -- is that people like Primo and Caesar have not passively accepted their structural victimization. On the contrary, by embroiling themselves in the underground economy and proudly embracing street culture, they are seeking an alternative to their social marginalization. In the process, on a daily level, they become the actual agents administering their own destruction and their community's suffering.[44]

Bourgois tells of a thirteen-year old boy who wants to grow up to be a cop, but as the years pass he becomes steadily entangled in the drug business as a runner and errand boy.[45] The future of the children in El Barrio is profoundly limited. Angel and Manny, ten and eight-years old, are "my two favorite shiny-eyed street friends."[46] After their mother became a crack addict, Bourgois happened to find them at home in the dark (electricity bill unpaid) "scraping peanut butter out of an empty jar," their mother passed out from her last crack binge.[47] Several years later, Angel was earning $100 per night selling crack, until he was placed on five years probation for shooting at a cabdriver in a bungled hold-up. Now he's cleaning a restaurant downtown -- off the books. He still lives with his mother whose crack-selling boyfriend stores crack in the apartment. Angel's girlfriend moved in with him and their baby.[48] The challenge that Professor Kleiman poses for reducing the role of juveniles in drug markets requires much more sophisticated economic and social changes than getting prosecutors to agree to abandon mandatory minimum sentencing tools.

Professor Kleiman is correct in identifying the social dimensions to the alternatives to drug dealing, but perhaps he is somewhere between realistically and excessively cautious in noting that "it seems implausible that anything we are likely to do with respect to youth employment will have a major impact on dealing."[49] The creation of meaningful youth employment may have important indirect effects on dealing that are not easily visualized through the drug policy lens because their primary impact is upon status and gender relationships.

He makes a very important point regarding all anti-drug persuasion programs: the messages that are developed are designed first to appeal to adult anti-drug leaders and the political constituencies to which they respond, and the likelihood that the anti-drug messages will resonate with the adolescents to whom they are ostensibly directed is in the realm of the accidental.[50] Professor Kleiman is on the right track in trying to identify what features of the drug dealing life attract young men. He is correct that in many instances the actual salary realized from drug dealing is not great, notwithstanding the mythology of riches.[51] Many young men in the barrios and ghettoes probably recognize that fact -- but it is a job that pays an off-the-books salary, and has other important benefits such as ready access to drugs and girls. His persuasion campaign would probably benefit by highlighting the features of the work that are repellant.[52]

C. "Persuasion" or "Punishment"

Unfortunately, I suspect that many of the "professional persuaders" in our society do not see much future for persuasion. In October 1996, I debated the school board president of one of the nation's largest school districts on The Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio, regarding "zero tolerance" drug policies in the schools. The issue was the appropriateness of a four-month suspension of an eighth grade student, Kimberly Smartt, from Baker Junior High School in Fairborn, Ohio. Smartt had been ordered expelled from September to February for taking two Midol tablets from the school nurse and giving one to a classmate.[53] The classmate was suspended for ten days and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.[54] The penalties were later reduced. I suggested that expulsion and suspension were excessive penalties for these offenses and, since the students were honor students, simply explaining to the students what they did wrong would be sufficient to correct the problem, but the school board president protested that would be totally inadequate. They do not listen, she explained, they only understand punishment. I thought she was describing a primitive way of training donkeys, not educating the children we are raising to lead America in the Twenty-First Century. Persuasion is no longer conducted "retail" in the United States, except in the courtroom perhaps, or in one-on-one sales. Most persuasion today is in mass advertising or manipulation, or by virtue of the threat of extreme sanctions adopted by the school board president and school principals.

Whether addressing children in El Barrio or honor students, our society is caught in the middle between not doing enough or doing too much. The real conditions get ignored for the children in El Barrio and the honor students get suspended because punishment has become the prevailing educational paradigm, not respect for students or their capacity to reason.

On to Part III