On Sunday, the Washington Post published the results of a long investigation about a drug ring centered in Fairfax County, a ring dedicated to violence and ecstasy (the drug). Those involved were suburban high school students or recent grads, and they acted like gangsters, with arm candy, expensive cars, and guns.
The piece was important and exhaustively researched. But the dominant tone of the piece was shock that kids from a "good neighborhood," such as suspects Owen Barber and Justin Wolfe, could be drug thugs.
"The local investigation is focusing on a cadre of educated, middle-class young people," said the piece. "Most of them met before graduating from Chantilly or Centreville high schools in neighboring Fairfax County. . . . Barber's father is a retired Marine, and Wolfe's mother is a nurse. None of them had any idea about their sons' alleged crimes. "None of this happened in bad neighborhoods," said Greg Pass, a Prince William detective."
The shock is about thirty years out of date, and represents a seriously distorted picture of the situation in this country with regard to drugs.
Two thirds of the people in American state prisons for drugs are black men. I daresay most of them came from the inner city. Such statistics, as well as the vague sense in a city like DC that the drugs are downtown, give rise to a picture of drugs as a largely a phenomenon centered in the city among black folks, young men, and the poor.
It doesn't take much thinking to see that such a picture is false. We have no reason at all to think that most drug users or dealers are black or live in the city: what we have reason to believe is that the criminal justice system is much better at detecting young urban black men than others.
Partly, this has to do with the circumstances under which drugs circulate in the inner city as opposed to the suburbs: rarely are there open-air drug markets in Germantown. Partly it has to do with profiling, by which I do not mean official policies of targeting certain groups for enforcement, but the background attitudes of law enforcement officers that make some people seem like criminals and others like respectable citizens.
An 18-year-old kid from Anacostia who is carrying drugs and weapon seems to many folks like a dangerous thug; an 18-year-old from Chantilly who is carrying drugs and a weapon is, first of all, much less likely ever to be searched, and, second, is likely to be seen as a good kid who got in with the wrong crowd, or something like that.
I grew up in Chevy Chase and Bethesda in the seventies. Our pleasant suburban neighborhoods were jungles of drug use. I lived just off Old Georgetown Road with a major cocaine dealer for years. But everything was available all the time.
We did our dealing and our using in each others' basements and bedrooms and back yards. No one I knew was ever busted in our neighborhood, though there were occasional busts when we ventured downtown. There were guns and expensive cars and all the various accessories of successful illegal businesses.
It was the heyday of heroin in DC, and the era of an unprecedented increase in anti-drug enforcement. There were continual busts downtown, but willful blindness uptown.
In brick ramblers all over the outer burbs, in huge mansions overlooking the Potomac, in semi-rural high schools, in Howard, Fauquier, Montgomery counties, kids are smoking pot and crack, shooting heroin, swallowing ecstasy. You know this; the police know this; the Washington Post knows this.
It is always a good time to reveal the extent of this problem. But to be shocked by it at this point is just bizarre.
