Trends in Alcohol Use, Cocaine Use, and Crime: 1989-1998

Summary

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The widespread belief that illicit drugs are closely associated with crime has contributed to America's "War on Drugs" and attendant increases in arrests, convictions, and prison populations. However, the links between alcohol and crime have received less attention from policy makers and the public despite consistent evidence that alcohol is more likely than other drugs to be associated with violence. This study explores the relationship between alcohol and cocaine use and crime from 1989-1998, based on findings from the Drug Use Forecasting/ Arrestee Drug and Alcohol Monitoring Program and the Uniform Crime Reports Program. We examine correlations among cocaine use, alcohol use, property crime, and violent crime at the city level to determine if there is a consistent pattern across cities over time. The analyses show a wide variation across cities in the links between both alcohol and cocaine use and violent and property crime rates over the 10-year period. However, the association between the annual rates of alcohol use and violent crime is stronger than that of alcohol use and property crime. These associations for alcohol remain in multivariate analyses, including statistical controls for temporal autocorrelation, SES, and heroin use. Cocaine use, in contrast, is not closely associated with either property or violent crime rates in the multivariate analyses. The findings suggest that to reduce violent crime rates, policy makers need to focus on addressing the contribution of alcohol. Furthermore, given the variation found across sites, efforts to reduce the drug/alcohol-crime links need to be tailored to local patterns and problems.

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Trends in Alcohol Use, Cocaine Use, and Crime: 1989-1998

INTRODUCTION

While it is assumed that there is an important connection between illicit drug use and crime, the links between crime and one legally available drug - alcohol - have aroused less public attention and been subject to fewer interventions from policy makers in the past two decades. For example, the War on Drugs has resulted in more severe criminal sanctions for the possession and sale of an expanding list of drugs, and dramatic increases in arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment rates for drug offenses (White & German, 2000). During the same 20-year period, most policy initiatives focused on alcohol's link to crime have been limited to efforts to reduce drinking and driving [e.g., all states adopted the minimum legal drinking age of 21; many states increased sentence severity for driving while intoxicated (DWI); and police continued to make more than a million DWI arrests annually (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, 1998; National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism [NIAAA], 2000).

This lack of policy attention to the alcohol-crime link beyond DWI is perplexing since research findings that stretch back nearly 50 years to Wolfgang's classic study of homicide (Wolfgang & Strohm, 1956; Wolfgang, 1958) have consistently documented an association between alcohol consumption and violent crime at both the aggregate and individual level. (For reviews, see Boles & Miotto, 2003; Collins, 1981; Lipsey, Wilson, Cohen, & Derzon, 1997; Murdoch, Pihl, & Ross, 1990; Parker & Rehbun, 1995; Pernanen, 1991; Roizen, 1993; White, 1997.) Aggregate level studies examining the alcohol-crime association have demonstrated that an increase in the population's drinking level is followed by an increase in rates o...

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