Pubdate: Sat, 03 Sep 2005
Source: Charlotte Observer (NC)
Section: Column, Everyday Ethics
Copyright: 2005 The Charlotte Observer
Contact:  http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/78
Author: Randy Cohen

REPORT A DRUG-DEALING NEIGHBOR? IT DEPENDS

Q.  I live in a gentrifying neighborhood. Someone on the block is dealing 
drugs that, I recently learned, are less benign than I'd assumed. He's 
dealing crystal meth. I believe that the drug laws are overly punitive, and 
I've never had a problem with the dealer. But I would like to see the block 
cleaned up and the drug traffic gone. What's the morality of narcing on the 
neighbors?

If your local drug dealer is just unsightly, do nothing. This is not to 
endorse dealing crystal meth but to assert that the war on drugs does more 
harm than the drug use it seeks to suppress.

I would be reluctant to invoke laws that can be both inflexible and 
ineffectual. (Indeed, a case can be made against regarding drug use as a 
criminal rather than a public health matter.) Similarly, in the early 19th 
century, when English law prescribed the death penalty for more than 200 
offenses, many jurors were rightly reluctant to convict individuals for 
such crimes.

If this drug dealer is a nuisance -- attracting a raucous clientele, 
perhaps -- you might consider measures that do not involve the police: 
speaking to your community board or local church groups or other 
neighborhood activists.

If this dealer constitutes a genuine threat, however -- and the actual 
damage done by crystal meth is a factor here -- if he is violent or 
attracts customers who endanger those around you, then you may call the 
police. You would be responding not to an abstract opposition to 
methamphetamine but to this fellow's tangible menacing conduct. If the 
methods mentioned above fail, then the law, for all its faults, may be your 
only recourse.

I do question your specifying that yours is a "gentrifying neighborhood," 
as if the ethical implications of the situation varied with the incomes of 
the people who live in them. What's sauce for the co-op on Fifth Avenue. ...

In fact, it is those in poorer neighborhoods who, when they seek to oust 
dealers from the block, can find it tough to get the police to respond.
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MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman