Easy, the War on Drugs began in the early 70s.

The murders and general lawlessness that you reference from the 80s are a direct result of the War on Drugs.

[1] https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/michaela/pages/70/atta...

"The murders and general lawlessness that you reference from the 80s are a direct result of the War on Drugs."

Where were the "murders and general lawlessness" in other countries that had even more expansive Wars on Drugs, like Singapore or Taiwan? America's War on Drugs is relatively mild compared to these countries that sentence drug traffickers to death.

[1] http://www.crack-facts.org/historyofcrack.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic#History

> these countries that sentence drug traffickers to death.

USA put small-time addicted drug users, in long jail terms. But only if they use crack, the "poor/black people" variant of cocaine, not the (expensive) white-powder variant of cocaine that rich/white people used.

    > How do you explain how Asia has even more "draconian"
    > drug laws than the USA and yet crime is a fraction of
    > ours?

In most of asia (by population or by state), low crime rates can be easily attributed to being able to settle the matter privately with the policeman for a small amount of money.

That's not true in Japan, where organized crime registers with the police, or Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan which are hugely wealthy microstates.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_o...

Edit: Spoiler: the inhabitable area is about the size of Puerto Rico, a country it has 8x the population of, and something someone who had been there would know...

Edit: HN won't let me reply to your reply below, which I'll take as a hint that I should stop arguing. As your first post was limited to Asian microstates, I agree that I shouldn't have thrown European countries into the mix. I still question the "micro-ness" of Taiwan, which is more populous than Hong Kong or Singapore by a factor of 3 or 4 (and not quite as wealthy), but sure, whatever.

    > what it is that Singapore,
    > Hong Kong, and Taiwan have
    > in common ... exclude, say,
    > Belgium or Denmark

Update: but ya know, even if it wasn't about continent(!) the main difference is that Belgium and Denmark sit in the middle of large areas with border-free travel, largely homogenous policing, largely homogenous drug laws and share the same Supreme Court with their neighbours. Seeing them as micro-states, rather than constituent states of the EU for this purpose surely misses the point.

The crack epidemic was a supply and demand issue. During the 1980s, the CIA enabled the flow of cocaine to help fund the Contras and other right-wing revolutionary groups in Central America. The new routes led to new manufacturing practices, and supply skyrocketed. This in turn dropped the price drastically, making cocaine suddenly available and affordable for a lot of people who couldn't get it before. Crack was another technical/marketing innovation, taking the old practice of freebasing and industrializing it. A quick, intense high got down into the $10-20 range, something even the desperately poor could afford. And since mainstream society doesn't usually care much about the troubles of the desperately poor, the cocaine industry had a relatively untroubled new market.

The end of this era wasn't so much due to draconian laws as to the end of the cheap supply.

The reason it was bad was because it was illegal.

Tens of thousands of innocent people die in Mexico almost every year because of drugs being illegal.

Make it legal and you remove the very foundation these drug cartels are based on.

[1] http://www.crack-facts.org/historyofcrack.html

There might be more Asian states fulfilling the statement (Thailand?), but this was the first one which sprung to mind.

Correlation != Causality