In 1963, the City of New York had 25,500 police officers, and a murder rate of less than 600 a year. In the mid 1980s, the murder rate about 2,200 a year. Today, for the first time in almost 40 years, the murder rate will be below 600. The number of police officers: 38,000. The number of 911 calls on an average day: 1,000. What are the other 37,000 officers doing? I don’t know.
Nobody seems to know what’s going on. Why is there a huge decline in the murder rate? Did people become good? Have we executed enough criminals now that we are finally safe? Has all that harsh law and order finally started to have a beneficial effect? Abortions?
The murder rate increased in connection with the widespread distribution of drugs. But drugs don’t cause crime. They don’t. Drugs cause people to waste their lives, and they cause people to do stupid things, and they are addictive, but there is no particular reason why someone using drugs would be more criminal-minded than, say, the CEO of Enron corporation.
But when drugs are illegal, and the cost to an addict increases to a preposterous amount, and the drug trade is hugely profitable because of the high prices caused by interdiction, crime will increase because of the illegality of drugs.
The truth is that drugs are not illegal in America. They are practically obligatory. Prozac, Lithium, Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil– you name it, you need it. The difference is that some drugs are not patented. Like marijuana, hashish, opium, and cocaine. So drug companies cannot profit from them by providing exclusive access to them. So they must be illegal.
I’ve already made my arguments for legalizing drugs. What I’m concerned with here is that New York’s murder rate is down to about the lowest number it’s been in 40 years. So if you believe that the world is rapidly heading to hell in a hand basket, and that our morally bankrupt nation is sliding into a hellhole of perdition and depravity, you’ll have to explain why it doesn’t show up in the murder rate.