In 1993, there were 454 murders in Washington, D.C. But in almost every year since, the number of murders has dropped. The same has happened in almost every other major American city, for reasons experts have struggled to explain.
Over the same period, the price of cocaine has plummeted. As the Atlantic Cities explains, this may have made the drug trade just unprofitable enough to take low-level dealers off the streets, and to dramatically reduce the amount of violent crime associated with dealing.
Cocaine was the driving force behind the majority of drug-related violence throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. It was the main target of the federal War on Drugs and was the highest profit drug trade overall. In 1988, the American cocaine market was valued at almost $140 billion dollars, over 2 percent of U.S. GDP. The violence that surrounded its distribution and sale pushed the murder rate to its highest point in America’s history (between 8-10 per 100,000 residents from 1981-1991), turned economically impoverished cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Trenton and Gary, Indiana, into international murder capitals, and made America the most violent industrialized nation in the world.
Then in 1994, the crime rate dropped off a cliff. The number of homicides would plummet drastically, dropping almost 50 percent in less than ten years. The same would go for every garden variety of violent crime on down to petty theft. The same year as the sharp decline in crime, cocaine prices hit an all-time low. According to the DEA’s System to Retrieve Information on Drug Evidence (STRIDE) data, the price per gram of cocaine bottomed out in 1994 at around $147 (calculated in 2003 dollars), the lowest it had been since statistics became available.
Something was wrong. If anything, cocaine prices should have been skyrocketing. One of the DEA’s stated objectives for the War on Drugs was to make drugs more expensive and therefore harder to access for the individual user. To get there, the DEA pursued a number of strategies: large drug busts, heavier penalties on importers and producers, and limiting access to the materials used in drug production. Even while many of those tactics produced big successes, cocaine prices still went down, not up, and crime plummeted right alongside.
In 1993, the DEA worked with the Colombian government to finally take down the Medellín drug cartel operating out of Bogota, which, at one point, was bringing in $60 million a day in drug profits. In 1994, DEA seizures brought in over 75,000 kgs of cocaine, the largest yearly haul at the time. From 1995 to 1996, they would arrest the entire hierarchy of the Cali Cartel, “the wealthiest and most powerful international criminal organization” and “the most significant enforcement action taken against organized crime leaders since the Appalachian Gangster Raid in 1957,” according to the DEA’s own description of the case.
