During the 1980’s, recreational use of cocaine in the United States exploded. The demand created by consumers was so great that it ignited a monstrous black market for international cocaine traffickers and domestic resellers.
When demand for a product goes viral,
so do profits and profiteers – cocaine was no exception.
While domestic production of synthetic cocaine would have greatly reduced the risks associated with illegal importation from foreign sources, natural cocaine remained the most cost effective and highest quality of cocaine available to resellers. Given the high demand for cocaine and the fact that natural cocaine was the product of choice for drug dealers, international trafficking of cocaine into the United States grew exponentially.
Demand for cocaine was not only prevalent amongst the upper class – who could afford high quality powder cocaine, but also amongst poor inner city consumers who used crack cocaine as a poor man’s substitute. Unlike powder cocaine, crack was cheap and very accessible.
For many years, Colombia remained the world’s biggest exporter of cocaine and the United States remained the world’s biggest importer. While this symbiotic relationship worked well for cocaine manufacturers, dealers, and users, it did not come without its costs to society.
First, the increased demand for cocaine caused an increase in street level dealing. This led to increased violence as street level dealers and their suppliers battled with other street level dealers and suppliers over territory. Keeping in mind that this was an illegal black market, there was no forum for competing dealers to resolve their differences, enforce their agreements, or fend off encroachments into their territory by competitors. Moreover, many of the people who engaged in the street level cocaine trade were already members of the criminal class and did not live their lives according to the same social mores as the rest of society. As a result, disputes in the cocaine business were usually resolved using violence on the open streets.
Second, there was a rise in crime associated with addictive behavior, such as theft, DUI, and domestic violence. As cocaine destroyed more and more lives, society suffered the consequences of collateral criminal conduct that is the necessary result of cocaine addiction, especially crack cocaine addiction.
This increase in crime and violence led to public outcry. After enough bystander had been killed by stray bullets from drive-by shooting and enough deformed crack babies had been born, the government finally reacted by tasking law enforcement with rooting out what had become a social epidemic. Simultaneously, politicians eager to attain higher and higher political offices reacted by introducing and passing minimum mandatory prison sentences for people convicted of the serious cocaine offenses, such as trafficking or possession with intent to sell within 1000′ of a school.