(Bloomberg Opinion) -- A nationwide surge in crime has emerged as one of Democrats’ greatest political vulnerabilities heading into this year’s midterm elections. They are scrambling to respond, abandoning calls to “ defund the police” and pledging to push for public safety and amend controversial bail-reform laws.
Such efforts may not be enough. So far, most Democrats show no signs of addressing one of the most robustly documented, and worsening, contributors to crime: drugs and alcohol. No attempt to reduce crime can succeed without addressing the substantial effect of the use of both on a wide range of socially harmful behavior.
Evidence linking changes in policing or the easing of bail rules to the recent spike in urban crime is inconclusive. But the connection of drugs and alcohol to crimes from murder to shoplifting is unambiguous and backed by decades of research.
Yet lawmakers keep moving to ease, not restrict, drug and alcohol use, even as those rates skyrocketed during the pandemic.
Numerous jurisdictions have decriminalized drugs, widened access to alcohol via to-go sales of mixed drinks, lowered alcohol taxes and shifted drug-treatment strategies away from an emphasis on sobriety. Instead, they have adopted a method known as harm reduction, which seeks to mitigate the public health risks of drug use without stigmatizing users or requiring them to stop.
The change in policy is a reaction to the so-called “war on drugs,” which, beginning in the 1970s, stiffened penalties and poured billions of dollars into interdiction and law enforcement. Levels of drug use and crime declined during ensuing decades but rates of incarceration shot up, especially in lower-income communities where racially biased policing upended the lives of low-level drug offenders and their families.
Lawmakers in both parties, especially Democrats, recognized the problems with this approach and have tried a variety of solutions. Over the past two decades, the number of Americans incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses declined by nearly a third. Nonviolent drug offenders now account for just one-fifth of all incarcerated people in the U.S., according to statistics compiled by the Prison Policy Initiative.
Marijuana is now legal for medical or recreational use in 37 states. Oregon became the first state to decriminalize all drugs two years ago. Progressive prosecutors in several of America’s largest cities have essentially taken the same approach by declining to prosecute possession or other low-level drug crimes.
At the same time, funding has increased for harm reduction programs that distribute overdose reversal medications, provide sterile drug paraphernalia and educate drug users about safe consumption practices without requiring them to stop or reduce their use.
Last year, Joe Biden became the first U.S. president formally to endorse harm reduction as federal policy. Millions of dollars for such programs were included in the administration’s $1.9 billion pandemic relief bill. Biden even made a point of using the term “harm reduction” in his March State of the Union speech.
The changes in policy have coincided with a rise in drug use, overdoses and drug-related crime. A record 37.3 million Americans reported being current users of marijuana, opioids or stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamines in 2020, up from 27 million five years earlier, according to federal health statistics. One in 10 Americans has an alcohol use disorder. An additional 6% are addicted to drugs.
The pandemic accelerated such trends. Drinking rates rose sharply beginning in 2020, and a record 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months ending in April 2021. Close to the same number died from alcohol-related causes in 2020, up 25% from the previous year.
Crime rates have risen disproportionately in some places where drug laws were changed. In Seattle, where a progressive city attorney effectively decriminalized most minor drug crimes beginning in 2010, rates of both violent and property crime rose steadily over the past decade even as crime mostly fell during the same period elsewhere in the U.S.
Various classes of property and violent crime also rose in San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco experienced one of the nation’s steepest rises in burglaries — close to 50% — in 2020.
More generally, a large body of research documents the connection between drug and alcohol use and crime. A 2004 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of state and federal prisoners found that half of violent offenders and close to two-thirds of those convicted of property crimes had used drugs in the month before their offense.
Close to a fifth had committed their crime “to obtain money for drugs.” Crimes linked to drug use included murder, robbery, assault, burglary, car theft and weapons violations.
A 2014 research review published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found similar totals: “Among prison inmates charged with violent crimes, 52 percent reported being under the influence of alcohol or drugs when committing the crime, or committing the crime to acquire money to purchase drugs. Among those charged with property crimes, this number is 39 percent.”
Another study showed that men with substance use disorders are up to six times more likely to commit acts of domestic violence. “Research has long indicated that there is an association between drinking and the perpetration of violent acts,” concluded a 1998 National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism research review.
Activists say blaming drugs for crime unfairly stigmatizes users and distracts from more pressing criminal justice issues, such as systemic racism, economic inequality and the lack of affordable housing. But decades of research also show a direct link between drug use and poverty. In a systematic 1999 survey of the economic effects of drug and alcohol use, University of Chicago economist Robert Kaestner concluded that chronic drug use “significantly increases the probability of being poor.”
More than half of all unsheltered people surveyed in a 2019 national study by researchers at UCLA reported that “use of drugs and alcohol contributed to lack of shelter.” Drug overdose is the leading cause of death among homeless Americans.
In 2019, officials in Seattle convened a working group to address rising rates of crime, homelessness and drug dealing in the city’s downtown. The panel found that a small cohort of close to 500 “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system were responsible for a disproportionate share of criminal activity in the area, including theft, assault, burglary and trespassing. Among that cohort, half “were diagnosed with a mental or behavioral disorder due to psychoactive substance use,” according to the panel’s report.
Debate continues among experts about the reasons for America’s recent spike in crime. Is it the pandemic, poverty, lax gun laws, the proliferation of “ghost guns,” gang disputes, the failure to treat the mentally ill or an overall erosion of social norms at a time of immense social stress?
Approaching the midterms, Democrats would be wise to recognize that voters appear to be making up their own minds, and voting accordingly.
Last year, Seattle voters replaced their progressive city attorney with a Democrat-turned-Republican who vowed to clear proliferating homeless encampments and prioritize the needs of homeowners and business owners who say they feel besieged by a wave of drug-related crime.
Progressive prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles both face recall efforts, and candidates in Los Angeles’ coming mayoral election have focused almost exclusively on two issues: public safety and homelessness.
Oregon lawmakers now are debating a bill that would redirect some drug funding back to law enforcement after an analysis showed that virtually no drug users were using treatment services made available by the state’s decriminalization law. Though the law was promoted as a way to move drug users from the criminal justice system into treatment, the initiative’s actual wording directs state funding to harm-reduction programs and explicitly steers treatment providers away from “mandating abstinence.”
Rates of drug use and overdoses have risen since the law’s passage. Last year, the city of Portland recorded a record 90 homicides, more than in larger cities such as Boston, Seattle or San Francisco.
“It’s really at a point where we have to respond, and we have to hold people accountable for the crimes that they commit,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said in a recent podcast interview. Breed, a Democrat, drew fire from progressive activists last year after announcing a crackdown on public drug use and drug dealing in her city’s long-struggling Tenderloin neighborhood.
“We do want someone who struggles with substance use disorder to get into treatment rather than to be out on the streets or to be in jail,” she said during the podcast interview. “And the difference might be, is we may have to use force to get them into treatment… Ultimately, we, as Democrats, we need to get it together.”
Her fellow Democrats will find out in November whether the voters think they did.
More From Writers at Bloomberg Opinion:
Why Is the U.S. Murder Rate Spiking?: Stephen Mihm
In Philadelphia, Teenagers Want Guns Off the Streets: Francis Wilkinson
‘Broken Windows’ Theory Was Right … About the Windows: Justin Fox
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jim Hinch is a senior editor at Guideposts magazine.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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