On Mon, 21 May 2001, Daniel Davies wrote:
> You might be right, and I also seem to remember that the counterfeit
> Marlboro and 555 business is indeed protected by guns. So maybe I'm
> applying a business-school model out of place. But I still think that
> the demand curve for tobacco is such that it's not going to be
> economic to sustain the kind of military infrastructure that crack and
> heroin do, or at least not in G7 countries. Frankly, I'm surprised
> that marijuana is worth shooting someone over, although the history of
> Jamaica ought to have wised me up to that one.
I think the problem might be that you're apply a cost-benefit analysis to a Hobbesian or prisoner's dilemma situation. Violence arises in illegal trades because by definition there is no impartial settler of disputes. And since any particular partisan is well-served by using more dreadful means of it, it tends to escalate, although the community of illegal dealers would all be better off if they stuck to fists.
Also once a world becomes violent, people that enjoy it rise to the top, and it starts to be run by the logics of honor and face and territory rather than sensible calculations of immediate return.
Although there's no denying that there's something to your threshold model of a certain amount of money "not being worth killing over." The woman who got murdered in Manhattan last had $60,000 worth of grass in her apartment. In 1970, that same amount would have been worth $2,000 (since back then, grass was $20 an ounce, rather than $600). So guys with guns and a desperate need for money would probably have been more likely to knock over a liquor store.
Of course the irony, as was originally pointed out, is that all this rise in price, and hence this violence, is produced by strengthening and enforcing the law, where the nonviolent, low-price world resulted from lax laws that weren't enforced. It's only when something is really illegal that real crooks take over. Otherwise us regular folks can get by with DIY smuggling and there isn't enough profit to attract the pros, just as you argued to start things off.
As far as tobacco is concerned, I think its relatively small "profit density" might be offset by the relative invisibility of its illegality. Crack, if someone sees it, you're busted. Illegal tobacco, on the other hand, looks just like legal tobacco -- the difference is in the details of paperwork. So tobacco can be smuggled by the lorry load and sold to a much larger clientele. And the driver of such a lorry is carrying just as much value as a crack dealer has in his pockets
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com