The Discussion About Violence and Drugs: Which Should We Punish?

Violence and drugs both are threats to social security. In order to solve those problems different people have different opinions. Some people hold that we should penalize the drug use directly; yet some people believe that the drug use could be penalized indirectly by punishing violent behavior. In fact through using the economic theories and recently collected statistics to analyze, we can find that the two different ways both have their owe advantages.

In general, penalizing the drug use directly could reduce the drug use quickly, since it takes advantage of two sides- demand and supply. From the demand side, firstly, social norm has a positive influence on decrease the drug use. For example, social norm causes that the societies have an aversion for the people who are drug users. Therefore, to some extent, social norm could decline the demand for drugs. Secondly, reinforcing the law and enhancing law penalties could reduce the demand as well. Since majority of public obey the law, even they do not believe the drug use is wrong, they will never break the law to persist their opinions. Finally, sanctioning the purchase or possession of drugs such as heavy fines and jail terms could also reduce the demand for drugs. While penalizing the drug supply side could also decrease the drug use. For example, through imposing costs such as transport and distribute fee, can reduce the legal suppliers who could not be borne, because their marginal costs are high. However, using this method is hard to penalize the black market suppliers, because they will evade those imposed costs such as income taxes, excise taxes, environmental regulation and safety and health regulation (Kellogg, Lecture 4, Summer 2011). At last, the black market supplier could keep the low marginal costs and expand the market share. In conclusion, penalizing the demand and supply sides of drug use could directly reduce drug consumption in the normal market, which conducted a large part of the drug transactions. Eliminated by the laws and governments, drug transaction volume in normal market will significantly decrease, and slight drug addicts will be badly restricted.

On the contrary, the people who support to penalize violent behavior also have their reasons. On one hand, existing evidence shows that the net effect of prohibition is to increase violence. For instance “the murder rate rose rapidly after 1910, when many states adopted drug and alcohol prohibition laws; the rate also rose through World War One, when alcohol and drugs were first prohibited nationally, and it continued to rise during the 1920s as efforts to enforce alcohol prohibition increased and the rate then fell dramatically after alcohol’s repeal in 1934 and (except for wartime) remained at modest levels for several decades (Kellogg, Lecture 5, Summer 2011).” In addition, “the arrest and incarceration of a dominant supplier can encourage price wars among the remaining suppliers as they compete