REPORT A DRUG-DEALING NEIGHBOR? IT DEPENDS

Q. 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 narcing on the
neighbors?

If your local drug dealer is just 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.

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 incomes of
the people who live in them. What's sauce for the 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.