Murder City

"To respond to the first part of what you just said: there’s an important study by a professor called Paul Goldsmith. He did a breakdown of every murder in New York City in 1986 that was described as drug-related. Some 2% were where an addict was committing a property crime to feed their habit, and it went wrong and they killed someone. Another 7% were where someone used drugs and committed an act of violence. And all the rest were armed criminal gangs killing each other to control their patch. It’s really important to understand this: the vast majority have nothing to do with drugs, they are to do with drug prohibition. In the same way, Al Capone wasn’t an alcohol-related killer, he wasn’t getting drunk and shooting people. The best way to explain it is like this: if you or I go to the local off-license [liquor store], and try to steal the beer or vodka, the owner will just call the police. He doesn’t need to be violent or intimidating. If we go up to the local coke dealer or the local weed dealer and try to steal their product, they can’t call the police, because the police will arrest them. So they do have to be violent and intimidating. The sociologist Philippe Bourgois says that prohibition creates a culture of terror. Charles Bowden, who wrote Murder City , talks about the war on drugs creating a war for drugs. Because drug dealers have no recourse to the law, they have to establish a reputation for being intimidating and violent, so that no one will dare to take them on. This massively increases the murder rate, as they have to establish and maintain their patch by force. Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, calculated there were an additional 10,000 murders each year in the United States because of this dynamic. I spent a lot of time with Chino Hardin, a transsexual crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn and he explained the dynamic to me extremely well. People think, ‘oh drugs cause violence,’ and clearly there are some genuinely drug-related killings, as we just saw – but they are a tiny minority of the killings described as ‘drug-related’, and vastly outweighed by the killings caused by prohibition itself. If we banned milk, and people still wanted milk, the milk market would become extremely violent, because it’s the nature of a prohibited market. The best way to test that is to ask, where are the violent alcohol dealers today? Does Oddbins go and blow up the drinks aisle in Sainsbury’s? Do they go and shoot the people that work in the Sainsbury’s aisle in the face? Does the head of Guinness send people to go and torture the head of Smirnoff? No. But under alcohol prohibition, there were a huge number of violent alcohol dealers. Nothing’s changed about alcohol, the drug remains the same. The method of how you sell it has changed, and therefore the murder rate massively fell. Jeffrey Miron, a professor at Harvard, does a brilliant graph in his book, Drug War Crimes , just looking at the murder rate in the United States through the twentieth century. It massively spikes in the 1920s during alcohol prohibition, then falls when alcohol is legalised, and only massively rises again with the huge intensification of drug prohibition in the 1970s. Murder City is by a journalist called Charles Bowden, who sadly died last year, and it’s a study of Ciudad Juarez, where I also went. It’s a city in northern Mexico on the border with the United States. El Paso, which is on the Texas side, and Juarez, which is on the Mexico side, used to be the same city. One of the things we know about the drug war is that the route of supply from the poor countries that grow the drugs, to the rich countries that consume them, will always take the path of least resistance. This is called the ‘balloon effect.’ If you imagine a balloon half full of air, if you push down on the air somewhere, it will pop up somewhere else. That’s basically what happens with drugs. If you think about the 80s, one of the main supply routes was up from Colombia, through the Caribbean and into Florida. That was the Miami Vice period. They cracked down massively there, so it started to go through Mexico. If you have a massive crackdown in Mexico, it will go somewhere else. What never happens is fewer drugs getting through. We know that because there would be a price rise if there were fewer drugs getting through, and that doesn’t happen. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Juarez is this city where, in the early 90s, there’s this huge torrent of illegal drugs. 70% of the economy is in the hands of armed criminal gangs, I was shown around by Julian Cardona, who is the brilliant Reuters correspondent there. He kept introducing me to families of people who’d been killed by the police. At some point I said, “Julian, I’ve got to get stories about people who have been killed by the cartels.” His just laughed, and explained that they’re not separate forces. If the cartel wants to kill someone, they employ the police to do it. That was the moment when I realised how really scary the situation is there. Murder City is a great analysis of what has happened to Juarez, and why, at the time that Charles Bowden was there, it was the deadliest city in the world. One mild criticism of the book I would raise is that there is a tendency with people who go to Juarez to get slightly drunk on apocalyptic rhetoric, because what’s happened there is so extreme. I think when Charles Bowden was there, it was 20 murders a day, while the murder conviction rate was 2% – and those 2% didn’t do it, they were people who were framed by the police. It really is a nightmarish landscape. It’s particularly peculiar because in many ways it feels like a normal American city. There’s a KFC, you can go to the mall and buy a flat screen TV. And, yet, murder has effectively been legalised. One of the most surreal things I did there was go out with a group of evangelical Christian teenagers. Anyone there who has ever protested against anything has been systematically murdered — journalists, politicians, civil society — and this group were just appalled that when bodies were dumped in the street, no one even stopped to look at them anymore because they were so scared. So they decided to do this mad thing: They dress up as angels. They wear these incredibly elaborate costumes, they paint themselves silver, and they’re really, freakishly effective. They stand on stools with robes flowing down from them, so it looks like they’re eight feet tall, and hold signs over the bodies that say things like, ‘Chapo Guzman, God is watching you’, or ‘Corrupt police, Jesus can see you.’ I was with them when they went and stood in the street, and people really reel back. They say, cynically, ‘Oh someone will kill the angels.’ But no one has yet, I think because they’re actually a bit superstitious. Who wants to be the person who shot an angel? So I understand why Charles Bowden does feel apocalyptic in Juarez. It’s a superb piece of reporting and I strongly recommend it. But there’s an element of playing up the apocalypticism, rather than the slightly more prosaic truth – which is that, actually, this would happen anywhere on the supply route that worked in the same way. If you put Oslo between Mexico and the United States and had 70 percent of the economy in the hands of armed criminal gangs, the same thing would happen. The specific manifestations would be different — maybe in Oslo they would dress as Vikings rather than angels, I don’t know enough about Oslo to be sure — but the kind of violence, the insanity, would be the same. There’s a degree to which we can play up Mexican exoticism of it, but actually it’s much more a standard product of the drug war. It is directly created by prohibition. It is the only way the system can work, once you’ve banned them. I interviewed Rosalio Reta, who was a hitman for the deadliest Mexican drug cartel, the Zetas, from when he was 13 to when he was 17. He butchered around 70 people, and I interviewed him in prison in Texas where he’s in constant solitary confinement because whenever they let him out, someone stabs him immediately. He helped me to understand this, and then looking at the sociology of Philippe Bourgois was a help as well. It’s tempting, when you look at this violence, to think it’s like Fred West or Jeffrey Dahmer, just psychosis, and clearly there is a degree of that. But, actually, it’s the functional effect of prohibition, because in a culture of terror where there’s a war for drugs, if you are the person who’s prepared to go a little bit further in violence than the other guys, you gain a brief competitive advantage. So, if you’re the first person who says, we’re not just going to kill the other side, we’ll kill their pregnant wives, you get a brief competitive advantage. If you’re the person who says, we won’t just kill their pregnant wives, we’ll put it on Youtube, you gain a brief competitive advantage. If you say, we’ll cut off their faces, sew their faces onto a football and send the football to their families — this is a real thing that happens — you get a brief competitive advantage. The structure of prohibition, and the nature of the prohibited market, means that whoever is prepared to push that boundary a little bit further, gains a market advantage for a brief period, until the other guys start to do it, and then of course it gets worse. Most of this violence — not all of it — is to do with the nature of prohibition. Referring back to Jeffrey Miron’s statistics, if we just look at what happened to the murder rate after the end of alcohol prohibition, it just fell off a cliff. We have the same dynamics in Britain – a lot of the stabbings in London are rival teenage gangs fighting for control of their patch – but it is much less extreme because much less of our economy is dominated by it. In Juarez, as I say, the best estimate is that 70 percent of the economy is the illegal drug trade. Even on the roughest estates in Britain – say, Easterhouse, which my mum used to live near – it’s not going to be anything like that. If Britain was in the middle of a supply route between a massive drug grower and a massive drug buyer, the same dynamic would happen here. On kids, I absolutely agree with you. My book is dedicated to my nephews who are all teenagers, and to my niece, who is a bit younger. One of my strongest motives for supporting drug reform is precisely that I want to deny them access to drugs. There are all sorts of reasons why teenage brains can be seriously damaged, including by cannabis. I don’t support legalization in spite of that desire. I support legalization because of that desire. In Camden, New Jersey, I interviewed a guy called Fred Martens, who was a right-wing cop. He reminded me of the Clint Eastwood character in ‘Dirty Harry.’ He is no one’s idea of a liberal, but in the 1970s he had an epiphany. He was in a carpark in Wayne, New Jersey, and he was staking out a drug dealer. He was in plain clothes, and a young teenager came up to him and said something like, ‘Hey Mister, will you do me a favour, will you go into that liquor store and buy me some booze because I’m too young to buy it?’ and Fred said ‘No, get out of here!’ So the kid went up to the drug dealer and bought drugs from him instead, because drug dealers don’t check I.D. “We gave it a fair shot: 100 years and a trillion dollars.” What we have at the moment is a system of anarchy. Unknown criminals sell unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark. Legalisation is a way of imposing regulation on that, currently completely deregulated market, and one of the things you can do when you regulate drugs is put barriers between people. So, for example, no one in my nephews’ school is selling Jack Daniels or Budweiser, but there are loads of people selling weed and pills. There was a study in the United States that found that teenagers find it easier to get hold of marijuana than they do to get hold of alcohol, precisely because drug dealers don’t check I.D. So, if your main motivation when approaching the drug war, and it’s a very good one, is to say you do not want your teenagers to have access to drugs, that’s one of the strongest arguments I know for legalisation."