On the E ect of Drug Enforcement on Property Crime 1

Although a part of the property crime rate can be explained by predatory crime committed by drug users, research often recommends not to enforce against drug crime, because law enforcement resource allocations accompanying strong drug law enforcement lead to more property crime. We develop a dynamic model including a drug court program to analyse the impact of drug enforcement on property crime. In this model it is almost always optimal to enforce, but the amount of drug enforcement expenditures and its time path vary depending on the parameter settings. Key parameters are the elasticity of demand of the drug and the estimation of the social costs of drug use. Whether enforcement is done, depends also on the initial value of the number of users. In this model it is optimal not to enforce only for an initial stock of users greater than a certain threshold and very low social costs of drug use or a low absolute value for the short term elasticity of demand.