After my wife and her mother walked past a drug deal in progress
on our residential street last month, we decided we’d had enough.
From then on we would call 9-1-1 whenever we saw anybody – black or
white, hipster or Latino — using illegal drugs on our block. That
included marijuana.
In our inner-city neighborhood joints are smoked like
cigarettes, right out in the open, by stoners of all ages,
including people strolling casually down the sidewalk. Sometimes
when my wife and I take our dachshund for an evening stroll it
seems we are walking through one continuous cloud of reefer smoke.
It’s like being at a Grateful Dead concert c. 1975. Nobody cares
because everybody does it. It’s considered normal for the
ghetto.
So it was time for a new normal. The next time my wife saw our
20-year old ne’er-do-well neighbors smoking weed in their backyard
she told them to knock it off. (My wife spent 15 years
investigating child abuse and neglect cases in The Big City. She is
fearless.) Naturally, they dismissed her.
“This is what black people do,” they informed her.
“Seriously?” she said. “Not the black people I know.”
“Well, this is our property.”
“It’s your grandfather’s property, and what you are doing is
illegal.”
“So? It’s our property.”
They simply couldn’t grasp the concept that you couldn’t do
illegal things on your own property. (Apparently St. Louis Public
Schools do not offer much in the way of logic courses.) My wife
told them that by openly smoking weed they were sending a message
to the dealers that drugs were tolerated on our block. (And, until
we came along, they were.) She didn’t bother to explain the Broken
Windows Theory to them, but that was what we were thinking. You
tolerate a little bit of crime, and it sends a message to the
criminals that they can get away with more serious crimes. Anyway,
they had been warned.
The next day they were at it again, toking away on the stoop in
front of their grandfather’s house. This time I called 9-1-1. I
told the dispatcher there were two young men using illegal drugs
outside our neighbor’s house. In less than three minutes three
cruisers pulled up. Unfortunately, the dope fiends had gone
inside.
I soon learned that the cops’ rapid response was due to the fact
that, following several recent shootings, our neighborhood was one
of the hotspots in which the St. Louis police are stepping up
patrols.
THE NEXT NIGHT the perpetrators were our neighbors across the
street, some four or five middle-aged people hanging out on the
stoop, partying and getting stoned. Again, I called the cops.
Again, they fled indoors in the nick of time. However, that seemed
to do the trick. Since the visit from Johnny Law that night, open
drug use seems to have curtailed considerably. We’ll see how long
this continues.
Libertarians/liberals say if we’d just legalize marijuana the
crime problem would be solved. Of course we’d have to legalize
methamphetamine too, the rural equivalent of marijuana. If
the overall goal is to reduce crime, it would make more sense to
legalize all drugs and every other so-called public order
crime from prostitution to poaching, though it’s hard to see how
blanket legalization will make society better off. Anyway, common
sense dictates that the burden of proof lies on those who want to
change society. They have the obligation to convince the rest of us
that society will be better off with legal pot and that there won’t
be any damaging consequences. And so far they haven’t made that
case. Not to my satisfaction. Until they do we’re sticking with our
zero tolerance policy. At least on our street.
