Drug Use and Felony Crime

Summary Though there is widespread belief that drug abuse is related to felony crime, precise linkages have not yet been established, in some measure because prospective linkages have been studied not only through the variant methods of social and “hard” science, but also because the methods of biochemical laboratory assay developed to detect the presence of drugs in the physical system have become more technologically discerning. Representative studies from the social sciences, relying on the self-reports of convicted felons, and from the “hard” sciences, utilizing “more” and “less” sensitive methods of laboratory assay, yield data that propose, at the extremes, that one of every six or one of every two felonies is at the least “lubricated” by drug use or abuse. But there is insufficient evidence as yet to conclude to the differential effects of specific substances with known biochemical properties that produce particular biochemical effects on the acceleration of particular types of felony crime. In fut...