The Wall Street Journal reports on a minor rebellion in the drug war and includes this counterpoint:
U.S. law-enforcement officials -- as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico -- say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing. "If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence," a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence "because these guys are flailing. We're taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now."
This is one of the paradoxes of the war on drugs that leads to ridicule from opponents of the policy. I spent my first year out of school writing memos for police chiefs on topics ranging from devising better systems for monitoring domestic violence to developing protocols for chemical attacks. One of the projects I worked on involved developing new metrics for monitoring the progress of the HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) program. The problem was just as described above. These cops would go in and target the upper echelon of a distribution network. When they achieved their mission, rates of violent crime would spike in their area of operations. The reason: once you take out the big fish, the small fish start killing each other as they battle for control of all those newly underserved customers. The cops wanted a new metric by which to judge their success -- one that would not penalize them for an increased murder rate that necessarily follows from doing their job, i.e. eliminating a major drug trafficker. It's easy to ridicule this kind of thing, but there's a great deal of truth to the statement above. If the police were to stop targeting the big fish, there would still be violence, but an organized criminal enterprise would be able to keep that violence to a minimum -- or, at the very least, out of sight. On the other hand, when law enforcement is successful, it spurs increased competition. As far as I'm aware no one ever figured out a metric that made this outcome any less troubling.