The Work: Dealing and Violence in the War on Drugs Era

The Work: Dealing and Violence in the War on Drugs Era Will Cooley In , ve heroin dealers victimized by assailants led for benets from the state of Maryland’s Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. In one example, a claimant was wounded and his roommate killed in a home invasion that netted the thief $ in marijuana and $ in heroin. The dealer sought $, . in expenses and lost wages from his regular job. The board was part of a national movement to attend to crime victims, but the sellers’ requests ran headlong into another trend: the demonization of dealers as the root cause of drug problems. The executive director dismissed them as “pushers,” and commented that “getting shot is a risk of the trade.”1 If drug peddlers wanted to regulate their market, the bureaucrat implied, they would have to do so on their own terms. He got his wish. Over the following decades, participants in the illicit narcotics industry produced calamitous amounts of serious violence, contribut- ing to a steep rise in crime that profoundly affected the American political landscape. To deal with increasing crime, the United States vastly expanded the scope of its criminal justice system at the local, state, and federal levels. Incarceration rates had been steady from the s to the s, but from to the number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose from approximately , to . million, creating the world’s largest penal system.2 The debate over the development of mass incarceration has broken down into three broad camps. Structuralists argue that the shift to punishment was a race- and class-based effort to control despised peoples.3 The author thanks the following people for suggestions and comments: James Barrett, Randi Storch, the Walsh Works-in-Progress Group, and the anonymous readers for Labor. The article is dedicated to the late Eric Schneider: scholar, mentor, friend. Narcotics Control Digest, April , , box , folder , American Social Health Association Records, University of Minnesota Libraries Social Welfare History Archives, Minneapolis, Minnesota; “States Move to Compensate Victims of Violent Crime,” New York Times, October , . National Research Council, Growth of Incarceration in the United States, . H. A. Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” Parenti, Lockdown America; Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime; Alexander, New Jim Crow. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, Volume 15, Issue 2 DOI 10.1215/15476715-4353704 © 2018 by Labor and Working-Class History Association 77 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/15/2/77/531007/0150077.pdf by SUNY AT CORTLAND user on 29 May 2018 78 15.2 LABOR Others, while deploring the staggering and counterproductive growth of the carceral state, note that the punitive turn was conditioned by escalating violent crime.4 A third faction—generally ignored by academics but carrying a great deal of weight with the public—contends that a harsh state was necessary and benecial in confronting cul- tural threats.5 This essay demonstrates that drug prohibition has been a prime driver of violence as workers in the informal economy engaged in rational market regulation. Most carceral state scholars have produced top-down studies that have not examined life on the ground, particularly in the lucrative, frenzied drug trade. In the absence of an examination of the lived experience of narcotics workers, a curious consensus has emerged downgrading the importance of the war on drugs, as commentators argue that those convicted of narcotics crimes make up an insignicant part of the prison population, and that deeper changes—structural or behavioral—are needed to address the nation’s crime problem.6 This is a useful corrective, as some reform- ers have misleadingly asserted that mass incarceration could be xed by stopping the prosecution of nonviolent drug offenders.7 Catching users has never been the core thrust of the drug war, but by dismissing prohibition, scholars neglect how under- ground markets signicantly contributed to violent crime, especially homicide.8 Drug dealers’ search for rewarding work interacted with the contextual issues of poverty, segregation, deindustrialization, and government policy to account for a substantial amount of mayhem in the war on drugs era. As labor historians have shown, workers have long sought not only a job, but also meaningful endeavors that allow them to develop their skills and personalities.9 In the s, observers noted that men were increasingly opting out of the work- force and going off the books, a trend that continued as conventional jobs offered less in terms of satisfaction and remuneration.10 Drug dealing provided an outlet for risk-takers who rejected the strictures of ordinary employment as well as the liberal credence of pushing for change through the system. Because they were engaged in illicit activity, dealers did not leave a paper trail, but an examination of ethnographies, journalistic accounts, and government reports containing their words and actions pro- . L. L. Miller, Myth of Mob Rule; Forman, “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration,” , , ®. . MacDonald, The War on Cops; Latzer, Rise and Fall of Violent Crime. ®. Brooks, “The Prison Problem”; Lane, “Ending the War on Drugs”; Gottschalk, Caught, ; Hin- ton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, ; Forman, “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration,” ; Pfaff, Locked In, ®, . Alexander, New Jim Crow, ; Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the NAACP Con- ference,” Philadelphia, July , , obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-ofce////remarks -president-naacp-conference. Miron, “Violence and the U.S. Prohibitions of Drugs and Alcohol,” ; O’Flaherty and Sethi, “Homicide in Black and White,” –®; Dell, “Trafcking Networks.” . Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, ; Meyer, Man- hood on the Line, . “The Great Male Cop-Out from the Work Ethic,” Business Week, November , , ®–®®; Flint, “Unreported Income”; Appelbaum, “The Vanishing Male Worker, Waiting It Out.” Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/15/2/77/531007/0150077.pdf by SUNY AT CORTLAND user on 29 May 2018 Cooley / The Work 79 vides insight on their motivations and agency.11 The labor vantage point helps explain the failure of punitive deterrence, and why jobs programs and economic upswings only partially eased the industry’s tribulations. The violence involved in drug dealing can be situated in the history of labor resistance under modern capitalism. When faced with repression and coerced con- formity, workers—especially males—often turned to volatile means in the search for fair returns and self-worth.12 The hypercapitalist, masculine, and unregulated drug economy in disadvantaged areas dramatically amplied this explosiveness. In the absence of formal dispute resolution but faced with the state’s battering ram, drug prohibition empowered those willing to utilize physical aggression. As the Marx- ist intellectual Louis Fraina noted, syndicalist-style labor revolts, shorn of collectively shared aspirations, elevated violence to a “creative principle.”13 Dealers, especially those facing enforcement pressures, engaged in belligerent actions because they wanted to control commerce, make money, and engage in an adrenaline-fueled enterprise. Under prohibition, aggression was usually rational, and without governance it spi- raled into cycles of collateral carnage as armed men created their own rules in the place of a discredited justice system. The state claimed to taper the trade through busts, but their boasts of tactical victories spawned chaotic market reconsolidations, worsening local conditions.14 Interpreting serious crime as rational does not diminish a focus on racial ineq- uities; rather, it shows how the state’s biases exacerbated violence in minority communities. Sociologists have identied differences in the structures of dealing by geogra- phy and socioeconomics. The “code of the street” stressed bellicosity, while the “code of the suburb” emphasized avoiding con±ict.15 These variations were not xed by cul- ture, but rather fashioned by enduring discrimination in the organized crime-police- politics nexus. Beginning in the late ®s, racial minorities began an underworld insurgency against multiethnic white syndicates that had left them table scraps in the rackets. Cooperation from compliant government authorities traditionally stabilized organized crime, but blacks and Latinos usually could not achieve this protection, making them unable to rationalize vice economies in places already beset by hard- ship and segregation.16 Many dealers in these communities were drawn to the high ceilings and free- doms of outlaw capitalism and simultaneously repulsed by its heartlessness, especially . For discussions of methodologies in the study of organized crime, see Kelly, Chin, and Schatzberg, Handbook of Organized Crime. Shor, “ ‘Virile Syndicalism’ ”; Schneider, Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings; Higbie, Indispens- able Outcasts, , , ; Andrews, Killing for Coal, –. For an alternative view of order and violence, see Cohen, The Racketeer’s Progress, . Fraina, “Syndicalism and Industrial Unionism,” . Gugliotta and Isikoff, “Violence in the ‘s Drugs’ Deadly Residue.” For examples from alcohol prohibition, see McGirr, War on Alcohol, –®; and Okrent, Last Call, . . E. Anderson, Code of the Street; Jacques and Wright, Code of the Suburb. ®. For the salience of the color line in organized crime, see Cooley, “Immigration, Ethnicity, Race,

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