Drug market disruption and systemic violence: Cannabis markets in Copenhagen
| Author | Kim Moeller,Morten Hesse |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370812467568 |
| Published date | 01 March 2013 |
| Date | 01 March 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2013
Article
European Journal of Criminology
10(2) 206 –221
Drug market disruption and
© The Author(s) 2013
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systemic violence: Cannabis
DOI: 10.1177/1477370812467568
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markets in Copenhagen
Kim Moeller and Morten Hesse
Aarhus University, Denmark
Abstract
This study aims to examine the association between drug law enforcement and rates of serious
violence. A police crackdown on a large and stable cannabis market in Copenhagen disrupted
established hierarchies among criminal groups and spurred renewed competition. In the five-year
period after the crackdown in 2004 there were more homicides and attempted homicides in
Denmark than in any five-year period for the previous 20 years. In the Copenhagen region we
found 19 shootings that had a connection to known cannabis sellers or cannabis-selling locations.
No such episodes were known prior to the crackdown. We estimate a fixed-effects (within)
regression model for all Danish municipalities for the period 2000–9 (N = 2110, 269 groups). We
find that there has been a significant relationship (p = .001) between drug arrests and charges for
serious violence the following year, after correcting for demographic and social covariates found
to be correlated with violence.
Keywords
Cannabis, Copenhagen, drug market, systemic violence
Introduction
Drug markets are arguably the most violent sector of the illicit economy (Andreas and
Wallman, 2009). A lack of access to legal resources, the value of the commodities and
participants recruited from social strata in which violence is more common make for a
volatile combination. It has consistently been found that law enforcement can destabilize
drug markets and lead to an increase in violence at national as well as local levels
(Kleiman, 1997; Miron, 1999; Rasmussen and Benson, 1994; Shepard and Blackley,
2005; Werb et al., 2011). However, our empirical knowledge is limited because most of
Corresponding author:
Kim Moeller, Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, School of Business and Social Science,
Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Email: km@crf.au.dk
Moeller and Hesse 207
the existing research concerns the increase in homicides associated with the introduction
and proliferation of crack-cocaine in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baumer,
1994; Baumer et al., 1998; Inciardi, 1990; Lattimore et al., 1997). This focus on a par-
ticular drug in a particular social context challenges the theory that violence is an integral
part of the ‘systemic’ operations of illicit drug markets (Goldstein, 1985), and several
researchers (Blumstein, 1995; Blumstein et al., 2000; Brownstein et al., 2000; Golub et al.,
2005; MacCoun et al., 2003) have noted how certain aspects of the crack-cocaine market
made it prone to violence: low per-dose price and many street-level transactions, distri-
bution by already violent street gangs, the value of the commodities, and a culture of
violence in communities characterized by ‘concentrated disadvantage’ (Ousey and Lee,
2002: 78). Put briefly, many industrialized countries have problems with illicit drugs, but
only the USA is known to have problems with excessively violent drug markets. Zimring
and Hawkins (1997) therefore suggest that drug markets are not violent in themselves,
but rather are a ‘contingent cause’ that requires pre-existing social conditions conducive
to violence to be present; that is, the ‘classic’ covariates of violence (McCall et al., 2008)
known from social disorganization (Shaw and McKay, 1942) and strain theory (Merton,
1938). This would help explain why research into drug market violence is absent in
Europe (Ousey and Lee, 2002), and maybe also why there are so few reports of vio-
lence associated with cannabis distribution (Reuter, 2009). Perhaps the generality of
the association between drug markets and violence has been overstated?
A series of recent events in Denmark support the notion of violence as a function of
the interaction between drug law enforcement and the drug trade. In 2004, Copenhagen’s
police cracked down on Denmark’s largest cannabis market in an area known as
Christiania, arresting 40 sellers and 35 various runners and look-outs. Cannabis had been
sold openly in this area for 30 years and it is commonly perceived to have had an almost
monopolistic share of the total market (Copenhagen Police, 2005; Moeller, 2012). After
the crackdown, police maintained a massive presence in the area for almost a year, effec-
tively displacing buyers to other more clandestine markets around Copenhagen. When
police left the area, a series of shootings erupted. Some of the shootings were selective
and instrumental executions of known cannabis sellers in Christiania; others were spec-
tacularly violent, indiscriminate shootings at groups of people around known cannabis-
selling locations in Copenhagen; some incidents appear to be retaliations from prior
shootings, and still others have no apparent link to drug markets. In the five-year period
after the disruption of the cannabis market in Christiania, the number of homicides and
attempted homicides surpassed any five-year period from the previous 20 years in
Denmark. The temporal association between the crackdown and the increase in homi-
cides is commonly noted in Danish media (Pedersen and Lindstad, 2012), and National
Police (2009) stated that some of the participants in the shootings are known to be part
of criminal groups with interests in the cannabis market.
Although there is sufficient research to have demonstrated linkages between drug
market destabilization and violence internationally, the conditions under which this
reflects a process where increased drug law enforcement leads to increased violence
needs further research. Against this background, the events in Denmark provide a good
case study. First, an affluent and egalitarian Scandinavian welfare state does not exhibit
widespread social problems related to the classic covariates of violence; and, secondly,
208
European Journal of Criminology 10(2)
cannabis markets are very rarely associated with violence (Reuter, 2009). We set out to
examine the effects of two processes that could plausibly lead to increased violence in a
drug market context: disruption of the dominant market and incapacitation of sellers in
Copenhagen, and increased deterrence nationally. First, the hypothesis is that disruption
of a stable market and incapacitation of dominant local sellers may lead to an increase in
local violence. Removing established sellers dismantles existing hierarchies between
criminal groups and leads to renewed competition (Kleiman, 1989; Storti and Grauwe,
2008). Increased competition in an illicit market implies that violence may be used
opportunistically in order to challenge the previously established hierarchical relations
(Rasmussen and Benson, 1994). Secondly, an overall increase in deterrence will theoreti-
cally increase both the risks and the potential profits from drug-selling and therefore also
the incentive to use violence. Under the assumption that demand is inelastic in the short
run, sellers will increase price to compensate for the increase in risk (Becker et al.,
2001; Kleiman, 1989; Kuziemko and Levitt, 2004). In both scenarios, the destabiliza-
tion and the capacity for and willingness to use violence among criminal groups become
a competitive resource.
The next section discusses the existing research on the relationship between law
enforcement and violence associated with drug markets and how this relates to cannabis
in Denmark. It is followed by a description of the data and empirical model. The final
section presents the findings and discusses whether the theory of a temporal connection
between drug law enforcement intensity and rates of violence is applicable to the events
in Denmark.
Previous research on law enforcement and drug market
violence
Law enforcement is the primary exogenous factor that affects drug markets. Many stud-
ies have examined the connection between drug law enforcement and various crime
rates, but there are only relatively few empirical studies on the specific association
between enforcement and violence (Brumm and Cloninger, 1995; Friedman, 1991;
MacCoun et al., 2003; Miron, 1999, 2001). Werb et al. (2011: 2), in a systematic review,
identified 14 studies and found that 93 percent of these reported an ‘adverse impact of
drug law enforcement on levels of violence’, which led them to conclude that ‘disrupting
drug markets can paradoxically increase violence’. The research on drug market violence
departs from Goldstein’s (1985) tripartite conceptual framework of ‘psychopharmaco-
logical’, ‘economic compulsive’ and ‘systemic’ violence. Systemic violence conceptual-
izes ‘the traditionally aggressive patterns of interaction within the system of drug
distribution and use’ (Goldstein, 1985: 150). Goldstein and his colleagues (Brownstein et
al., 1992; Goldstein et al., 1989, 1992) applied this conceptual scheme empirically to
homicides in New York and found that drug market participants with no access to the
legal system may resort to violence to settle disputes or gain competitive advantage.
Further, it has been found that such violent disputes are typically initiated at the higher
distribution levels (Coomber and Maher, 2006); that is, the violence is mostly...
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