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Is crack as a cause statistically proven or did it just correlate? Crack still exists today (Hunter Biden) and it’s easy to get cocaine but no one blames crack today for murder rates. Chicago I am more familiar with and most murder is over stupid shit. Like someone posted a video on YouTube calling you bad names.
Great Migration was over the prior few decades. Plus Civil Rights. So perhaps the first generation moving to big cities had some selection effects for behavior, but the kids did not who would have come of age in the ‘80’s. Honestly just spitballing a theory because crack caused murders to go boom makes less sense today since crack still exists and no one blames crack today.
Crack ruined the preexisting social order in black communities that kept gun violence down from previous decades. Afterwards, gun violence and gang wars became embedded and normalized in parts of black culture. So even without the crack, the gun violence continued because it had been normalized for an entire generation. Additionally, there were advancements in drug production chemistry know-how and increased world trade that led to increasing popularity of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. Now, we have Mexican drug cartels importing opioid precursors from China, and those drugs make their way into black communities.
So, my thesis is that black murder rates are high without crack for two reasons - gun violence normalization and alternative drugs supplanting crack in the drug economy ecosystem. Fentanyl doesn't lead blacks into gun violence directly, but I'm sure the dealers and distributors use violence to protect their business.
I guess corners mattered a lot more back then. Today they don’t. So maybe it did just cause a cultural thing. I know anytime I go thru Chicago murders it’s over very dumb stuff and rarely appears drug dealing related. Cartels I think have also cut down on drug murders. But someone from the southwest would know more. It’s bad for business so they keep the violent part of the drug trade in Mexico.
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