Pubdate: Sun, 04 Sep 2005
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: Column, The Ethicist
Copyright: 2005 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Randy Cohen
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

DEALING WITH DEALERS

I live in a gentrifying neighborhood. Someone on the block is dealing drugs 
that, I recently learned, are less benign than I'd assumed; he's dealing 
crystal meth. I believe that the drug laws are overly punitive, and I've 
never had a problem with the dealer. But I would like to see the block 
cleaned up and the drug traffic gone. What's the morality of narcking on 
the neighbors? Anonymous, Brooklyn

If your local drug dealer is merely unsightly, do nothing. This is not to 
endorse dealing crystal meth but to assert that the war on drugs does more 
harm than the drug use it seeks to suppress.

I would be reluctant to invoke laws that can be both inflexible and 
ineffectual. (Indeed, a case can be made against regarding drug use as a 
criminal rather than a public health matter.) Similarly, in the early 19th 
century, when English law prescribed the death penalty for more than 200 
offenses, many jurors were rightly reluctant to convict individuals for 
such crimes.

If this drug dealer is a nuisance -- attracting a raucous clientele, 
perhaps -- you might consider measures that do not involve the police: 
speaking to your community board or local church groups or other 
neighborhood activists, for example.

If this dealer constitutes a genuine threat, however -- and the actual 
damage done by crystal meth is a factor here -- if he is violent or 
attracts customers who endanger those around you, then you may call the 
police. You would be responding not to an abstract opposition to 
methamphetamine but to this fellow's tangible menacing conduct. If the 
methods mentioned above fail, then the law, for all its faults, may be your 
only recourse.

I do question your specifying that yours is a "gentrifying neighborhood," 
as if the ethical implications of the situation varied with the cost of the 
apartments and the incomes of the people who live in them. What's sauce for 
the expensive co-op on Fifth Avenue. . . .

In fact, it is those in poorer neighborhoods who, when they seek to oust 
dealers from the block, can find it tough to get the police to respond.

This past season, our new local baseball team sold sponsorship packages 
that included most of the ballpark's reserved seats, some of which went 
unused. The team later put those same seats up for sale. Was it ethical for 
them to get paid twice for the same seat? Anonymous, Bremerton, Wash.

If neither the original purchaser nor the new ticketholder objected, who am 
I to carp? And that was largely the case, says Rick Smith, general manager 
of your Kitsap BlueJackets. Local businesses bought a package that included 
ads in the program and on the outfield fence as well as reserved season 
tickets, many of which went unused even as fans were especially eager for 
seats along the first-base line. The team sought to make them available, 
"as much to see them not be wasted as to raise revenue," according to Smith.

Smith informed season ticketholders and new ticket buyers about the 
"floating reserve" plan: you could buy an unused reserved seat, but if the 
original buyer showed up, you had to move to a seat nearby. The plan worked 
fine. Smith adds that next year's sponsorship package will include fewer 
season tickets.

It would be different if the team failed to get both the original and the 
new seatholder's O.K.: selling the same seat to two different people can 
lead to awkward encounters -- angry words, thrown punches, brawls that 
spread across the stadium and then to nearby towns, forcing the governor to 
call out the National Guard, a big distraction from the game itself.

Send your queries to  or 
The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, 
N.Y. 10036, and include a daytime phone number.
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MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman