Skip to main content

The Difference Between Drug War Violence and "Drug-Related" Violence

Submitted by smorgan on

This article in the New Hampshire Union Leader gets it right:


Testimony: Drug war behind street shooting

MANCHESTER – Lennoxx Tibbs was shot to death as a result of a drug sellers' turf war, according to police testimony yesterday at probable cause hearings in Manchester District Court for the man accused of shooting Tibbs and the man accused of accompanying him…

Meanwhile, the Herald & Record in Illinois gets it wrong:

Three charged in drug-related shooting

DECATUR - Three Decatur men allegedly involved in a drug deal Thursday that ended in a shooting have been charged in Macon County Circuit Court with five Class X felonies and an assortment of drug charges...

There's been a longstanding and misleading tendency in the press to invoke the term "drug-related" to describe unfortunate events that didn’t even involve drug use, and that's why the Union Leader headline above is such a rare and refreshing example of responsible reporting on drug trade violence.

When you hear the term "alcohol-related," you can be damn sure we're talking about someone doing something reckless & dangerous after getting wasted on booze. Thus, we must also insist that the term "drug-related" be used exclusively to describe incidents arising from the effects of drug consumption, and never the ubiquitous harmful results of drug prohibition itself.

Just imagine if the media properly attributed every episode of horrific drug war violence to prohibition rather than just drugs. That critical distinction is truly the fulcrum from which an individual's view of our drug policy swings in one direction or the other. The instant one learns to identify and distinguish between the harms of drugs and the harms of the laws against them, it becomes vastly more challenging to justify and uphold our present policies.  

So please, the next time you see the term "drug-related" used to described harmful outcomes caused by prohibition, send the reporter a note suggesting that a term like "drug war violence" be used instead. It's just a fact that the drug war kills infinitely more people than all illegal drugs combined, and we should demand media reporting that places the blame squarely where it belongs.

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.