DEALING WITH DEALERS

I live in a gentrifying neighborhood. Someone on the block is dealing drugs
that, I recently learned, are less benign than I'd assumed; he's dealing
crystal meth. I believe that the drug laws are overly punitive, and I've
never had a problem with the dealer. But I would like to see the block
cleaned up and the drug traffic gone. What's the morality of narcking on
the neighbors? Anonymous, Brooklyn

If your local drug dealer is merely unsightly, do nothing. This is not to
endorse dealing crystal meth but to assert that the war on drugs does more
harm than the drug use it seeks to suppress.

I would be reluctant to invoke laws that can be both inflexible and
ineffectual. (Indeed, a case can be made against regarding drug use as a
criminal rather than a public health matter.) Similarly, in the early 19th
century, when English law prescribed the death penalty for more than 200
offenses, many jurors were rightly reluctant to convict individuals for
such crimes.

If this drug dealer is a nuisance -- attracting a raucous clientele,
perhaps -- you might consider measures that do not involve the police:
speaking to your community board or local church groups or other
neighborhood activists, for example.

If this dealer constitutes a genuine threat, however -- and the actual
damage done by crystal meth is a factor here -- if he is violent or
attracts customers who endanger those around you, then you may call the
police. You would be responding not to an abstract opposition to
methamphetamine but to this fellow's tangible menacing conduct. If the
methods mentioned above fail, then the law, for all its faults, may be your
only recourse.

I do question your specifying that yours is a "gentrifying neighborhood,"
as if the ethical implications of the situation varied with the cost of the
apartments and the incomes of the people who live in them. What's sauce for
the expensive co-op on Fifth Avenue. . . .

In fact, it is those in poorer neighborhoods who, when they seek to oust
dealers from the block, can find it tough to get the police to respond.

This past season, our new local baseball team sold sponsorship packages
that included most of the ballpark's reserved seats, some of which went
unused. The team later put those same seats up for sale. Was it ethical for
them to get paid twice for the same seat? Anonymous, Bremerton, Wash.

If neither the original purchaser nor the new ticketholder objected, who am
I to carp? And that was largely the case, says Rick Smith, general manager
of your Kitsap BlueJackets. Local businesses bought a package that included
ads in the program and on the outfield fence as well as reserved season
tickets, many of which went unused even as fans were especially eager for
seats along the first-base line. The team sought to make them available,
"as much to see them not be wasted as to raise revenue," according to Smith.

Smith informed season ticketholders and new ticket buyers about the
"floating reserve" plan: you could buy an unused reserved seat, but if the
original buyer showed up, you had to move to a seat nearby. The plan worked
fine. Smith adds that next year's sponsorship package will include fewer
season tickets.

It would be different if the team failed to get both the original and the
new seatholder's O.K.: selling the same seat to two different people can
lead to awkward encounters -- angry words, thrown punches, brawls that
spread across the stadium and then to nearby towns, forcing the governor to
call out the National Guard, a big distraction from the game itself.

Send your queries to (mailto:ethicist@nytimes.com)ethicist@nytimes.com or
The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 229 West 43rd Street, New York,
N.Y. 10036, and include a daytime phone number.