On the Multiple Sources of Violence in Drug Markets

• Published date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12224
• Date: 01 August 2016
• Author: Peter Reuter

POLICY ESSAY

DRUG MARKET CONFLICTS IN

AMSTERDAM

On the Multiple Sources of Violence

in Drug Markets

Peter Reuter

University of Maryland

Illegal enterprises operate in settings of risk and uncertainty that are very different

from those in legal businesses. Scott Jacques, Richard Rosenfeld, Richard Wright,

and Frank van Gemert (2016: 843–875) compare street dealers in Amsterdam with

caf´

e and coffeeshop owners, inter alia, with respect to how they respond to victimizations,

such as thefts or customer threats of violence. They test propositions concerning the effect

of illegality, a continuum from caf´

es (wholly legal, selling alcohol), through quasi-legal

(coffeeshops selling marijuana)1to cocaine street dealers (wholly illegal), on predation,

victimization, and responses to such events, particularly the invocation of formal authority.

Jacques et al. see this as contributing to the debate about drug legalization, as well as to the

sociology of law and criminology. They conclude that “drug-related harms,” which seem to

be synonymous with victimization of drug sellers, as opposed to drug use or its sequelae in

their idiosyncratic terminology, are reduced by regulationrather than by prohibition. They

also speculate that full legalization without tough regulation induces seller carelessness so

that drug-related harms might rise. Jacques et al. also note that a problem is presented by

the confounding of a legal regime and the characteristics of the substance. No reader is

likely to forget “drunk cat like lion; high lion like cat.”

There is good reason, though, to question whether this highly original empirical

research by Jacques et al. (2016) is relevant to the broad policy debate on the optimal

The author would like to acknowledge that Melvin Soudijn contributed important insights to this essay and

that Bryce Pardo provided excellent research assistance. Direct correspondence to Peter Reuter, School of

Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: preuter@umd.edu).

1. There is an important terminological problem in the article. Jacques et al. (2016) use “Decriminalization”

to include a regime in which not only is possession of small amounts legal but there are also legal

vendors, although production and trafficking remain illegal. As used in many other studies,

decriminalization is restricted to regimes that remove criminal sanctions for possession but leave all

elements of supply subject to criminal sanctions (Kleiman, Caulkins, and Hawken, 2011; MacCoun and

Reuter, 2001). Throughout this policy essay, I will refer to the coffeeshop regime as “quasi-legal”; there is

no general consensus in the literature for that unique regime.

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12224 C2016 American Society of Criminology 877

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 3