2 bodies found on Detroit's east side; Westland teens?

[detroitsgwenivere]

No SWMAP, what is described above is not what those supporting decriminalization have in mind.

Picture going into a pharmacy, farmers market, or head shop. Or maybe someone's home if they grow pot. Otherwise, no need for selling off the street if the business can be conducted legitimately and out amongst society.

The real problem will be, how to intervene in the lives of these young dopepeddlers before they turn to violent crime in order to feed themselves. Because if drugs became legal, the majority would be out of a job.

[iheartthed]

Probably crack and heroin, it seems like the guys selling that crap like to keep it moving rather than trust unpredictable crackheads and junkies to 'be cool' coming up to a spot

I think it's probably more heroin or pure cocaine being sold than crack.

There were some studies in the late 90s that found a direct link between the nationwide drop in urban homicide rates and the decline of the crack epidemic:

Another study, by Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson, of the nonprofit National Development and Research Institutes in New York, found a steep decrease in crack use among young people being sent to jail in places like Manhattan, Washington and Detroit, starting in the late 1980's. In Manhattan, the rate of detected crack use among juveniles admitted to jail dropped to 22 percent in 1996 from 70 percent in 1988. In Washington, that rate declined to 10 percent in 1996 from 30 percent in 1989. In Detroit, it fell to 5 percent in 1996 from 45 percent in 1987.

One reason this decrease in crack use by young people is significant, criminologists say, is that it was a doubling of the rate of homicides by juveniles that produced much of the increase in violent crime in the 1980's. The homicide rate for adults 24 and older has actually been shrinking since 1981.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/27/us...ted=all&src=pm