The Wire and The Economics of Drugs

I started watching The Wire recently. I’m through the first season, and so far I really enjoy the show. Since I can’t watch the NCAA basketball tournament this year (long story) I’m relying on it to entertain me a lot in the following week. The show explores the different points of view of the drug business in Baltimore, including the police, the dealers, and the junkies. And while there’s a lot going on in the show, like character development, subtle social commentary, and showing the horrors drugs bring about, the most interesting aspect of the show to me so far has been the discussion of drugs as a business.
                     The show discusses everything from the treatment of customers to inelastic vs. elastic products to the financial dependence of families on the drugs to supply and demand. The most striking part of this entire discussion to me has been the perspective of the young men in the service of D’Angelo, an up and coming drug dealer. The three main assistants highlighted are Bodie, Poot, and Wallace.

What I find fascinating is that for all three of these young men, the possibility of education is never realistically considered. Wallace mentions it to D’Angelo once, but aside from one conversation, none of them ever really think about it. They have accepted their roles as the pawns in the organization, and while they want to move up, the idea of getting out is completely foreign to them. D’Angelo mentions how he and his family were born into the trade, and we see how much each of the young men have to fight to support their families. That, I think, is one of the pieces most people forget when they talk about the war on drugs or about fixing the community or any other high minded ideal: why would anyone choose to spend four years in high school, on the off chance of being able to go to college for four years to get a job that earns five figures if they could earn six figures selling drugs? Especially when they have families they have to feed and they’ve been raised around that culture for their entire lives?

When you’re born into that environment where drugs are as common as a sun rise, more often than not the choice is either to become a seller or a user. And because of that, because people will always need money or want an escape, drugs will never go out of business. The idea that legal constraints and heightened police action can eventually end the drugs or the violence is asinine for one reason: the cash. Regardless of any other factor, drugs are still big and will continue to be so unless demand goes down. Now, I’ve said before that I don’t want to talk politics on this blog, so I won’t, but I do think that a lot of the demand and violence would go down if drug laws were eased up a bit, and I think that the government would save itself a decent amount of money from not funding these initiatives either. But that’s a discussion for another day. The point, though, is that until the drug problem is solved, community enhancement is probably a pipe dream. And solving that problem will be almost impossible. “There is no ‘War on drugs’” one character states, “Wars end.”