Philadelphia Weekly

After a historic cocaine bust, could Philadelphia be facing a historic coke shortage?

At first glance, it might seem like it.

It's April Fool's Day, and the Philadelphia Police Department is showing off its latest drug bust. There's so much cocaine on the table it looks like it's about to buckle.

A SWAT team guards the 748 pounds of coke, as the mayor, the police commissioner, a U.S. attorney and others all crowd behind a podium, eager to bask in the glory of the largest coke bust in the city's history.

"This is the mother's milk of the violence," U.S. attorney Patrick Meehan says at the press conference. "These are the drug dealers that are selling the drugs and then fighting over the turf."

Indeed, it's been victory after victory recently for the area's drug warriors. The work of the Philadelphia-Camden High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force led to the convictions last month of Southwest Philly drug kingpin Ace Capone and three lieutenants of Camden's Raymond Morales, who pleaded guilty to ordering the deaths of six people. "This kind of crime is literally evil," assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Lloret told the assembled media after Coles' conviction.

Drug busts happen seemingly every day.

Just two days after the announcement of the 748-pound coke bust, cops in Chester round up 21 street-level drug dealers and users. Hundreds of drug dealers have been arrested already this year. Ace Capone and Morales' underlings face life sentences.

But despite the bust, Philly won't suffer a coke shortage for long. Chief Inspector William Blackburn even admits it at the press conference. "I think there will be a shortage of drugs on the street," he says, "but not for an extended period of time."

National Public Radio reported in December that while there are spot shortages of cocaine--such as last spring in Philadelphia--the long-term supply remains as steady and as cheap as ever. That report even quoted police Capt. Christopher Werner, commander of the city's narcotics field unit, refuting the rumored shortage.

In essence, if the Philadelphia police seize 748 pounds of cocaine, 748 more pounds will soon be on its way into Philadelphia. "By the end of two weeks, there will be little evidence left at all that a record-sized drug bust ever occurred, other than the police records and the past media reports," David Borden, founder and director of the Drug War Resource Network, writes.

It once seemed like the war on drugs was a winnable affair. When Pablo Escobar died in 1993, much of the Medell�n cartel went with him. But drug dealers have adapted.

David Boyum and Peter Reuter explain in 2005's An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy that gangs and cartels no longer dominate drug dealing. They write: "[M]ost organizations today resemble a confederation or network of freelance traffickers or small trafficking groups more than a single, tight-knit, organization."

And if there is a short-term paucity of cocaine on the streets, it's not just users who are harmed. The head of Atlanta's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force credits stronger policing against drugs for the city's 2007 uptick in robberies, burglaries and auto thefts.

More murders, Jack Killorin told the Atlanta Journal Constitution March 9, could be on the way: "If the market here gets unstable down to the street, then the streets will get bloody."

"We are taking the city back," Mayor Nutter says gleefully at the press conference for the historic bust. "Anyone who doesn't understand that needs to get out." Although Nutter is urging drug dealers to leave the city, it's no surprise a government-created black market draws Philadelphia's poor citizens looking for a way up. And if more robberies are what we can expect from the largest drug bust in city history, it won't be the criminals who'll leave town--and the shortages we'll face won't be of cocaine.