Ending the War on Drugs Will Do More for Blacks Than Marching

John McWhorter, Professor, The Languages of America, Columbia University, Contributing Editor, The New Republic and City Journal, has a proposal:  End the War on Drugs so the black men will be required to seek legal employment.  He rambles on over a variety of other topics, but this is the inner kernel of his argument:

The War on Drugs discourages young black men from seeking legal employment. Because the drugs' illegality keeps their price high, there are high salaries to be made in selling them…

You can find a podcast of him reading a longer article on the same topic at the CATO Institute website (search for January 11, 2011).

Regardless of the arguments he presents, I think that McWhorter is being too optimistic about what would happen if drugs – including cocaine, heroin, meth, etc. – were legal and cheap.  He claims that, since the profit will be taken out of drug dealing, the gangs, the turf battles, the guns and violence that hangs over black communities around the country would end.

I’m not a social scientist (and I don’t believe McWhorter is, either) and I haven’t done much more than read the newspapers over the years to develop my sense of criminals in the US.  But I’m thinking that the scenario he presents is unrealistic.  If a gang hierarchy existed to distribute illegal drugs and that source of income disappeared, I suspect they will move on to another source of income.  Just like the bootleggers of Prohibition moved on to bookmaking, illegal gambling, prostitution and other income sources once liquor became legal again.

What might these newly de-profited gangs move into?  How about “protection rackets” – where a shopkeeper is threatened with arson or vandalism if he didn’t pay the gang?  How about car theft and chop-shop operations?  Why not counterfeiting tickets for sporting events?  It would seem to me that the expected logical result of making drugs legal and cheap would be for those involved in the illegal side of the drug trade to move into other illegal operations.  Why is that not reasonable to expect?

Maybe not.  Maybe the dealer who was making $1,000 a day selling drugs wouldn’t be satisfied making $400 a day selling counterfeit tickets.  OK, but McWhorter thinks he would be satisfied making $150 a day working at Wal-Mart!  Really?  Why does that make sense?  Maybe I’m the one missing an obvious response to ending the war on drugs…help me find it by leaving your comments below.