The production, consumption, and transportation of illegal drugs and alcohol constitute, by far, the largest arena of criminal activity in the United States and elsewhere. Thousands of other crimes, from murder and robbery to burglary and petty thefts are also directly linked to both abusive and recreational uses of legal and illegal substances. Drugs and alcohol function as both a cause and an effect of crime. Their production and consumption exhibit interesting geographic patterns, and these patterns help answer many societal problems.
Temperance Movements
Various states, counties, cities, and even townships have passed laws to restrict or prohibit the production and sale of alcohol, with varied success,since before the American Revolution. Religious conservatives and women’s groups started several temperance movements during the 19th century. They had little success. The alcohol industry was important almost everywhere. Almost every small town in American had a locally operated brewery, winery, or distillery. During this time, alcohol taxes were also an important source of tax revenue for various levels of government, especially during wartime. During the 19th century, millions of immigrants streamed into the US, bringing with them a variety of European cultural traditions, some of which involved copious consumption of wine, beer, or spirits. Some argued that there was a strong association between heavy drinking and a variety of social ills, many of which were pronounced within immigrant communities. In the aftermath of World War I, the politics of booze changed. The political power of beer/wine drinking German-Americans was greatly diminished, while women’s political power greatly increased. Safe drinking water became widely available, and income taxes capable of offsetting the loss of alcohol taxes were in place. These factors permitted the temperance movement to surge forward, and the 18th Amendment passed outlawing the production of most types of alcohol in the United States.
Figure 8-15: New York City:- Men pour a barrel of alcohol into a sewer while law enforcement officials look on during the prohibition era. Source: Wikimedia.
This grand legal experiment, known today as Prohibition lasted 13 years (1920-1933) and it is widely considered a failure today. During Prohibition, Americans could not legally sell, produce, import, or transport alcohol. Overall, the consumption of alcohol fell, and so too did the overall crime rate, but enforcing Prohibition quickly became a massive problem. Because there was still a large demand for booze, the illegal transport and sale of alcohol, known as Bootlegging, began almost immediately. Widespread violation of Prohibition occurred because many Americans thought outlawing alcohol was unjust and beyond the authority of the government. Enforcing prohibition quickly overwhelmed the police, the courts, and the penal system. Corruption among the police was rife. Canada and Mexico had no similar laws, so they became major production centers for booze that was smuggled into the United States. Owners of shuttered breweries, wineries, and distilleries took up the cause to repeal the 18th Amendment. Even doctors, many of whom relied upon alcohol to concoct medicinal liquors (cough syrup, etc.) wanted to repeal the law. After more than a decade, the balance of evidence seemed to suggest that Prohibition had failed. The law did not fit the prevailing sentiment on alcohol. It is from this experiment that the expression, “You can’t legislate morality” emerged. Still, lawmakers in many parts of the US continue to try to do just that.
Figure 8-16: Promotional Poster 1873 - This poster featuring both German and English proclaims the virtue of wine as a component of a happy married life. It stakes a claim to the moral legitimacy of German-American values. Source: Wikimedia.
White Lightning
During Prohibition, the illegal production of a potent corn liquor, known as moonshine flourished, especially in Appalachia. This powerful clear alcohol gets its interesting name from the tendency of those who produce and transport this liquor to work at night to avoid detection. To aid in their clandestine operations, moonshiners tended to distill their liquor in geographically remote locations, far from the prying eyes of law enforcement. Decades ago, cars used to transport moonshine were reputedly modified, or to help bootleggers evade law enforcement officials. Cars were “souped-up” to make them go faster and equipped with heavy-duty springs to better hold heavier cargo. Legend holds that this led to the evolution of stock car racing in the Upland South. The legend is probably embellished.
Although it has been nearly a century since national prohibition elapsed, moonshining continues apace in parts of Appalachia. Several reasons, rooted in the geography of the Upland South, can be identified. First, there is a long history of corn liquor production in Appalachia. The Scottish and Irish that constitute a significant part of the ethnic heritage of Appalachia, brought the practice to the region hundreds of years ago. Perhaps more importantly, local versions of Prohibition continue in many parts of the South to this day. Many people in the South and Appalachia live within dry counties, meaning the sale of alcohol, or at least some types of alcohol, is illegal in those counties. Oftentimes, only portions of a county are dry, or there are exceptions for specific locations or events. In any case, banning the sale of booze in these regions encourages the production of moonshine. Where alcohol is permitted, often taxes on it are very high to discourage its consumption. These laws and the associated sin taxes remain in place in the South largely because conservative, anti-liquor Baptists, Pentecostals, and Methodists are politically dominant. Ironically, because the production of moonshine can be very profitable for its producers, both the bootleggers and Baptists favor the maintenance of laws that have evaporated elsewhere in the country. It is a longstanding and ironic political, and economic relationship that favors the status quo.
Figure 8-17: Map - Kentucky counties by legality of alcohol. Data Source: Kentucky Alcohol Beverage Control
Geography presents another set of factors favoring the production of moonshine in the Upland South. The mountainous terrain and geographic isolation of the region prevent Appalachian farmers from cheaply producing and transporting grain crops to populous urban markets. Transportation costs encourage farmers in remote locations to turn to the production of alternative “agricultural goods” capable of turning a profit despite the added transportation costs (see Von Thunen Model – Agriculture Chapter). Because transportation costs associated with corn liquor are far lower per unit of product than corn itself, especially in Appalachia, there is a strong economic logic incentivizing alcohol production there. In recent years, larger operations have been known to yield thousands of gallons, allowing moonshiners to make thousands of dollars per week locations with few well-paying, legal, employment options. Marijuana production occurs under similar conditions.
In a few locations within Appalachia, especially the karst regions of Kentucky and Tennessee, groundwater sources are often naturally filtered through layers of limestone bedrock, changing the chemistry of the spring water in a way that is ideal for the production of high-quality whiskey and bourbon production. As a result, several best-selling brands of whiskey in the United States are distilled there. Not surprisingly, some of these distilleries are in dry counties. Take, for example, Lynchburg, Tennessee, where the world-famous Jack Daniels whiskey is distilled. It’s in a dry county. Over 10 million cases of Jack Daniels are bottled in Lynchburg every year, but you can’t buy a shot of it there.
Marijuana
Perhaps the most widely broken law(s) in the United States over the last 40 years are those associated with the production and consumption of cannabis, better known as marijuana. Most people get away with breaking marijuana laws for sure, but according to the FBI, each year police arrested around 1.5 million people for various drug abuse violations. Marijuana-related offenses are easily the most numerous of those crimes, though arrests for the manufacture of marijuana has fallen as legalization and decriminalization progresses.
Figure 8-18: Woodland Hills, CA - The city of Los Angeles legalized medical marijuana and hundreds of dispensaries opened across the city in a matter of months. Many businesses used outlandish colors and language to market their product.
The prohibition against marijuana dates to the early 1900s, and it parallels in some ways the prohibition of alcohol. Americans disagree about the dangers and morality of using marijuana, and millions ignore marijuana laws. Law enforcement efforts vary wildly across the United States and have varied through time. Some US Presidents have pushed federal policy toward jailing all drug offenders; others are less enthusiastic about it. Several politically progressive states have sought to decriminalize or even make marijuana legal in recent years. Oregon and Colorado were the first to make recreational use legal.
The production of marijuana is an important agricultural activity in many parts of the United States. Marijuana production hotspots have a lot in common with moonshining regions. Both tend to occur in isolated areas, especially in mountainous regions. Good soils and rainfall favor some locations more than others. In those locations, a lack of viable industrial or agricultural alternatives seems to be a key factor promoting marijuana production. Appalachian states are important suppliers of domestically grown pot in the U.S. Tennessee and Kentucky rank high for both the production of plants and the value per acre. Hawaii is also a major producer, partly because it has a great climate and superb soils, but also because it has little competition from outside. California, particularly the Emerald Triangle region in the northwestern corner of the state far out-produces the rest of the country. Like Appalachia, the remoteness of northwestern California makes it difficult for law enforcement to easily find illegal fields of cannabis. In locations where pot production is an important economic activity, law enforcement may have little incentive to aggressively police the activity, especially where law enforcement agencies' budgets are heavily reliant on taxes raised indirectly from the pot industry.
Figure 8-19: Map - States in New England and the West Coast have moved to decriminalize marijuana in recent years. Source: Wikimedia
There is also a cultural-political variable driving California’s pot industry. Many of the people who established the pot industry in the Emerald Triangle were “hippies” who moved from the Bay Area in the 1970s the “war on drugs” forced production into hidden locations. Over the years, the economy of northwestern California has become reliant on the marijuana crop. It is the leading industry there and the primary source of basic income for the region. The creeping legalization of marijuana production across the United States represents a significant threat to the economic lifeblood of the region. Not only would growers from other locations, who live closer to the major markets, be able to undercut growers in the Emerald Triangle via lower transportation costs, but more importantly the explosion of competitors (supply) would drastically lower demand and therefore lower the price of marijuana. Legal pot could be an economic disaster for the places that depend on bootlegging marijuana. Because the Emerald Triangle is essentially a monocropping agricultural zone, much like those places that rely solely on coffee or bananas, expanded competition can be ruinous (see Agriculture Chapter 3). If marijuana becomes completely legal in the US, growers in the Emerald Triangle may need to market their product differently. Marijuana producers in the Emerald Triangle may find themselves using the same marketing techniques used by vintners in Napa Valley, touting the quality of the local soils, climate, and the skill of their master cultivators.
Medical Marijuana
Perhaps no place in the country witnessed a more spectacular response to the legalization of marijuana than Los Angeles. When medical marijuana was legalized in 2004, hundreds of marijuana retailers, or dispensaries, opened within a few months. Some estimates put the number at around 600. Dispensaries outnumbered mainstream pharmacies by a wide margin. By mapping dispensaries, while using pharmacies as a control variable, several interesting questions could be answered about marijuana sales in LA. For example, what does the map of dispensaries tell us about who is using marijuana for medicinal purposes? For recreational purposes? One could assume that if marijuana was sold primarily for medicinal purposes, then the distribution of dispensaries should be very similar to the distribution of pharmacies. Instead, the map reveals dense clusters of dispensaries in specific neighborhoods (e.g., near college campuses) suggesting that marijuana is probably sold more for recreational purposes than for medical ones. California legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, once again changing the legal environment in which this industry operates, and those changes are bringing shifts in the landscapes of cannabis.
Figure 8-20: Map - The eastern San Fernando Valley had an unusual number of marijuana dispensaries, especially compared to standard pharmacies. Discrepancies such this suggest that recreational users fueled the expansion of the industry. Sources: ESRI, WeedMaps
Opioid Crisis
The legalization of marijuana invites many questions about how legalization affects addiction to more lethal drugs, like heroin. After all, the recent spike in heroin abuse in the US evolved from the legal distribution of opioid pain medications. In the 1990s, millions of Americans were newly diagnosed with chronic pain. Doctors treated as over 100 million people with a variety of painkillers, including Percocet, Vicodin, Oxycodone, and other opioid- based pain management drugs.
Figure 8-21: US - The rate of drug overdoses by state shows a reasonably strong correlation with the rate of prescription making. West Virginia is a well-known terminus of the OxyContin Express. Source: CDC. Interactive Map
In Florida, where many elderly people with age-related chronic pain live, became the pain medicine capital of the US during the 1990s. The huge number of elderly patients in Florida provided masked the fact that hundreds of unscrupulous doctors and pharmacists were making huge profits by over-prescribing opioid drugs to drug dealers who posed as chronic pain patients. By 2009, doctors in Florida were prescribing ten times the number of Oxycodone or “Oxycotin” pills than doctors in the rest of the country combined. Drug dealers from all over the eastern half of the United States were making regular trips to Florida to visit dozens of pain clinics where they would pick up dozens of fraudulent prescriptions, many of which were filled by pharmacists in the doctor’s office. These opioid drugs bought in Florida were later sold on the streets and abused by people taking them without a prescription. As a result, several transportation routes to Florida’s pill mills, including air routes and Interstate 75 were dubbed, “The OxyContin Express”.
Figure 8-22: US Map - Florida was for many years a hotbed of so-called "pill mill" doctors and pharmacies that make huge profits from prescription pain medications that become street drugs. Source: US DEA and SHADAC. Interactive Map.
In recent years, more aggressive policing of pill mills, and a reformulation of Oxycodone created a scarcity of many prescription pain pills, which drove up the price for them on the street, and in turn invited those addicted to prescription pain pills to turn to cheaper, but more deadly alternatives to prescription opioids, including heroin, Fentanyl and a host of other synthetic opioids made in “labs” run by crime syndicates in the US, Mexico, and China. As a result, drug overdoses from opioids (prescription and illegal) have gone up from about 6 per 100,000 in 1999 to over 21 per 100,000 in 2017. The US Congress and state governments have been slow to act.
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