Suppressing Illegal Gun Markets: Lessons from Drug Enforcement

As the nation contemplates a major effort to reduce the availability of handguns to urban youth, inter alia through aggressive enforcement against illicit transactions, it seems useful to consider what we can learn from the experience of attempting to suppress illicit drug markets. Since 1985, drug enforcement has probably represented the nation's largest commitment to control an illegal market through criminal sanctions ever undertaken.1 Commitments to state prison for drug offenses now constitute about thirty percent of the annual total, or roughly 130,000.2 The results are at best mixed. Prices for cocaine, heroin, and marijuana remain very high compared to what they would be in legal markets, at least twenty times the legal price in the case of cocaine.3 Perhaps as a consequence, attractive illegal drugs like cocaine are used by many fewer persons than alcohol; how much that should be attributed to illegality per se as opposed to the stringency of enforcement is indeterminable at this time.4 On the other hand, these prices have fallen substantially in recent years,5 and availability, at least for youths,