STUDY MISTAKENLY LETS DRUG DEALERS OFF TOO EASY

If you're looking for some, you ask around: "Who's got it?"

Someone supplies a name, an address or a general location. Once you get
someone to vouch for you -- as in "yeah, he's cool" -- you can come and go
as many times as you want.

Doesn't sound that difficult, does it?

Drug dealing in the inner city never has been. In some neighborhoods, the
local drug dealer is as much of a presence as the corner grocery store.

Or the funeral home, which may be a more appropriate comparison.

A new study by John Hagedorn, an assistant professor of criminal science at
the University of Illinois-Chicago, on the thriving underground drug market
makes the argument that drug dealers in the inner city are hard-working
members of the service economy.

And are as legitimate within that context as anybody who flips burgers, or
the merchant who sells 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and cigarettes, for
that matter.

There is validity to this point of view: drugs ARE big business, and
Americans of all stripes need their daily fix of caffeine, nicotine,
alcohol and a lot of other more acceptable (re: legal) medications to get
through the day.

Reading through the study, it is sometimes hard to tell whether Hagedorn is
trying to legitimize drug dealers or simply providing an explanation for
their existence.

He writes: "While drugs are harmful and destructive, as well as illegal,
this report has sought to dispassionately understand the drug business in
the context of the various economic and entrepreneurial strategies of the
minority poor, in contrast to drugs' more social role in the white suburbs."

In other words, poor black and Hispanics sell drugs because there aren't
enough jobs in their neighborhoods, while white folks sell drugs just to
get high with friends.

Hagedorn, whom I once visited at his small office on the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus a few years ago, is an interesting fellow, an
academic mind consumed with understanding gang behavior. He is the author
of "People and Folks," a book about Milwaukee gangs.

He treats gangs the same way some anthropologists treat rare bugs or a
particular species of lizard, dissecting their behavior and environment for
insight.

Of course, this sort of academic study can tend to over-complicate things.

In nature, some animals survive by preying on smaller, defenseless animals.
And some folks sell drugs in the inner city because they know a lot of
their neighbors are too weak to resist.

Particularly when the drug is as addictive as crack cocaine, which, if
legal, would outperform Viagra on the stock exchange, no contest.

What Hagedorn ignores is the predatory nature of many dealers: they
understand they are selling a kind of poison, guaranteed to create ripple
effects within the families of the buyers.

A mother who abandons her children, a husband who hands over the weekly
paycheck, young people who lose respect and faith in the adults around them
because they're nothing but a bunch of crackheads.

Tobacco companies sell a form of death, too. But the folks who make
Newports don't go to war with the folks who make Camels, spraying
neighborhoods with Uzi fire in an attempt to protect their market share.

As far as I can tell, few people get gunned down over a pack of squares.

In the end, there's no way to sugarcoat drug dealing in the ghetto, not
even by pointing out the disproportion in arrests and sentencing of
minorities in the criminal justice system.

Most people use drugs out of a need to escape life's harsher realities for
a brief time, but all of their problems are still waiting for them when the
high is over.

The people who exploit that need -- regardless of the human cost in their
own communities -- are not just selling drugs, they are selling misery.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski